Rationalising Death (Pre-Rewrite Version)
by nightelf37
Summary: Recovered from Scientist's Thesis. What if the mentioned super intelligence of Yagami Light and his antagonists wasn't just informed, but was actually true?
1. Chapter 1

nightelf37: Thanks to a certain application that is no longer available on Google Play, I am able to 'rescue' this fanfic from oblivion. Well, sort of. The actual fanfic still exists, but it is under a heavy rewrite. I asked Scientist's Thesis, the original writer of this fic, and whose real name happens to be Pedro, for permission to publish the original version, and I got his thumbs-up. And because the application doesn't track chapter names, there will be no chapter names.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scientist's Thesis/Pedro. Now, may I present...

 **Rationalising Death**

* * *

 _TW: Attempted rape, premeditated murder_

* * *

 _Author's Notes: The noted intelligences of Light, L, Mello and Near are mostly informed abilities. What if they weren't, though?_

* * *

 _A/N 2: If you're arriving now, welcome! I'd like to ask you to review this, as there's no other way for me to receive any feedback and improve. So whether you love it or hate it, please do take five minutes of your time if you can to expose your thoughts, even if they have already been voiced by other people there! That way I can know which aspects are the most salient in my readers' minds so that I can work on writing better. Thanks!_

* * *

 _3:37PM. November 27, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami Light, a high school student of 17, was sitting bored in class when the event that would culminate in a complete revolution of the world happened.

 _This world is rotten_ , he thought, as he stared out the window. He was propped on his elbows, holding his head and waiting for the sensei to finish her lecture. _Dirty, broken._ Light's mind was wandering, as usual. The sensei mostly didn't mind - he was the prodigy - but he couldn't help but be grim during these moments.

The way he saw it, the world was a pretty awful place. Corrupt politicians, cruel criminals, evil CEOs and even day-to-day evil acts made it that way, but everyday stupidity ensured it would stay like that. Nobody could make even a simple utility calculation. The only saving grace was that this was as true for the villains as for the heroes.

That train of thought never really left his mind. Not when he was studying, not when he was reading, eating, showering, training. He wished, and dreamt, and wished more. He wanted... a world of peace. A utopia, perhaps with him being the advisor of the overlord - not the overlord himself, of course, he didn't like political positions. Unless no one else was fit to step in. But he preferred being in the back, behind the curtains.

 _What's that...?_ Suddenly there was a small, dark rectangle on the grass outside. _A notebook...?_ He could've sworn it hadn't been there a minute ago.

A while later, the class bell rang. He quickly packed and left the classroom. However, he hung back and waited to see if anyone would claim ownership of the mysterious black notebook. No one did. He picked it up.

On the cover, the words "Death Note" were written in a stylized font. Nothing else. He opened the notebook, and the first page was also black, with what looked like a set of instructions.

THIS IS A SHINIGAMI NOTEBOOK, the first sentence read.

 _Shinigami... a god of death?_ He kept reading.

THE HUMAN WHOSE NAME IS WRITTEN ON THIS NOTEBOOK SHALL DIE.

 _This is sick. Why do people like this crap? This is worse than those chain letters..._ Still, he was curious. He put the notebook in his bag and headed home. The whole time, though, he was thinking about the notebook. _Who would write a notebook like that? Why?_

And one insidious, barely audible voice in his head said, And what could we do with such power?

* * *

 _4:19PM._

He arrived home, removed his shoes and greeted his mother, who was in the kitchen. Then he quickly scrambled to his room, locking the door behind him as he did so. That wasn't usual for him, but this was an unusual situation. He calmly slid the notebook from his backpack and put it on his desk.

THIS NOTEBOOK WILL NOT TAKE EFFECT UNLESS THE WRITER HAS THE PERSON'S FACE IN THEIR MIND WHEN WRITING HIS/HER NAME. THEREFORE, PEOPLE SHARING THE SAME NAME WILL NOT BE AFFECTED.

IF THE CAUSE OF DEATH IS WRITTEN WITHIN 40 SECONDS OF WRITING THE PERSON'S NAME, IT WILL HAPPEN.

IF THE CAUSE OF DEATH IS NOT SPECIFIED, THE PERSON WILL SIMPLY DIE OF A HEART ATTACK.

AFTER WRITING THE CAUSE OF DEATH, DETAILS OF THE DEATH SHOULD BE WRITTEN IN THE NEXT 6 MINUTES AND 40 SECONDS.

 _This is completely insane. Who would think of this?_

His bedroom was tidy and organized. The bed, always neatly made, was by the wall on the right with a bookshelf on each side. The desk that held the death note also supported a computer and a small TV screen. Light flopped himself onto the cushion.

 _Death if you write the name... Insane... Inhuman..._

And before Light could suppress the thought: _And bears testing._

He quickly dismissed it as the random ramblings of his head. How was the notebook even supposed to work in the first place? Magic? That strained credulity beyond possibility. It was just some prank. On whom, though... was another matter. And what, exactly, would anyone accomplish with this?

 _If I had made this notebook as a prank... what would've been my objective?_

The first answer that sprang to mind would be to prove that people are selfish and would murder anyone who inconvenienced them. But Light thought that was probably just his regular train of thought catching up with him. In fact, there was a surprise: since he picked up the notebook at school, he hadn't yet had a single thought of how humans were inefficient at being moral. Not directly, anyway. Interesting.

He spent ten minutes chewing on his lips until he gave up, sat on his desk chair and stared at the notebook. Tentatively, he opened it and flipped past the first page. All other pages were just regular notebook pages. He picked a pen and... waited. That would be murder, if it worked.

 _Don't be silly_ , his common sense said. _Such things don't exist. It couldn't possibly work. You'll just write someone's name, nothing will happen, and then tomorrow someone will come to you and ask for the notebook, and then they'll point at you and say you're a horrible person. "You actually wrote a name in this!"_

Another part of his mind was telling him to test it.

 _Why am I even taking this seriously? This is insane._

 _Well,_ his practical (and curious) side said, _it obviously can't work, can it? It's just a prank. So you might as well. But you shouldn't write someone who's close to you there. Also, why would you want to kill a close person?_

 _Yes, that's obvious,_ his common sense replied. Light watched this internal struggle with some fascination and wondered why he was actually even considering it. _But in case you've forgotten, killing is bad. We'd have to find someone whose death wouldn't matter._

 _No,_ Practical answered. _We have to find someone whose death would result in a net positive change in society's expected utility._

 _That doesn't make sense_ , said a part of him that was grudgingly becoming convinced. _How would killing anyone result in that?_

 _Oh, you've worked that out already_ , Test It answered. _In fact, in the deep dark corners of your mind you have figured out many things that could make your utopia work. And amongst them is the simple fact that some people would make the world a better place if they were dead. Criminals, for instance. Murderers, serial killers, rapists. People who only make other people's lives miserable, who take and destroy other lives, people whose impact on the world will never be good._

No one had anything to say about that in his mind. So he just thought. And thought. And kept thinking. It was true. He routinely pictured scenarios with people he found in the news where they somehow died and the world became a better place. One by one. All of those people.

 _Suppose I want to actually test this notebook_ , Light thought, while remarking that he'd never felt so divided in his mind as right this moment. _Where do I fin-_

 _The TV_ , the practical side answered as soon as Light turned on the small monitor beside his computer. He had just been thinking about checking the news, hadn't he?

"The murderer who indiscriminately killed 6 people yesterday in Shinjuku's Hanka District is still locked up in the preschool with the teacher and 7 children as hostages."

 _Bingo._

"The police suspects Otoharada Kurou, 42, unemployed. Last night, Otoharada was..."

 _Do I think this piece of news will last for more than 6 minutes 40 seconds? No, obviously not... So... heart attack it is._

He felt... strange. Tingly, almost. Suddenly it didn't look so unthinkable, so impossible. Something in his mind was justifying it: the guy had already killed six people and had another eight caught as hostages, seven of whom are children. There is no way the world was better with this man alive. His pen reached for the paper. He fixed the picture of the man on the TV in his mind. He wrote the name. Immediately, he looked at his watch. He couldn't understand why, but he actually expected it to work.

...37, 38, 39, 40 seconds.

Light looked at the TV. The announcer was about to change subject. Light sighed, somewhat relieved and disappointed at the same time, and was about to turn it off, when...

"Oh! The hostages are coming out! Seems like everyone is fine! And now the police is storming the school! Have they made the arrest?"

 _Im... possible..._ Light's eyes widened slowly, and he started sweating. That couldn't be true. He kept watching. The police got in, and some time passed. They finally got out... with no one. No suspect.

"According to the hostages, the suspect just collapsed. The..."

Light immediately turned the TV off, closed his notebook, put it in the first desk drawer and sat on his bed, agape and shocked. His whole body shivered and his face looked pale. Someone watching him from the outside would probably conclude he was severely ill. His vision was swimming and he almost didn't hear his mother calling from downstairs.

"Light-kun! It's time for dinner!"

"Coming, mother!" he replied mechanically. His mind was still trying to compute the implications and failing.

 _Okay, let's try to calm down and rationally analyze this. Maybe it was just a coincidence..._

 _Yes, sure, it could've been a coincidence. But you have to admit that the prior probability that a random 42-year-old man will have a heart attack at any given moment is pretty low. More than that, though, the hypothesis that there is a correlation between writing the man's name and his death is no longer negligible._

 _I need to test it again._

And one tiny voice in the background said, _But that's murder._

Test It promptly replied: _It's not bad to kill someone who deserves to die._ The tiny voice didn't answer.

He thought he was rather calmer than he should be, and then he realized his hands were shaking so badly he couldn't actually reach the desk drawer and grab the notebook again. He closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, steadied himself, and opened them again, reaching for the drawer once more.

"Light!"

"Just a minute!" Damnit. Still, what were the odds?

 _We can, in fact, estimate that..._

 _Shut up, I wasn't serious._

* * *

 _8:28AM. November 28, 2003._

For the first time since he started watching the news when he was little, Light wasn't thinking just passively about how to make the world a better place. How to teach people to be moral. He was, in fact, thinking about action. About what he could actually do.

The next day, his mind wandered. But that wasn't unusual. He was, however, paying much more attention to the world around himself.

 _Do we really want to test it more? We already have what could be called pretty definitive evidence..._

 _Verify_ , that tingly part he called Test It replied as he walked into his classroom. It _could_ have been just a coincidence. He saw some boy being bullied, and his annoyance with the state of the world once again grew. But of course, the bullies weren't actually doing anything worthy of a death sentence - yet.

"The money is his," Light said with a bored monotone to the bullies. They looked at him, outraged at being called out, but then their faces went a little bit pale for a second before they turned on the acting again and mumbled something about "not needing the money anyway." When his back was to them, Light chuckled to himself. Being the smartest kid in the class with a reputation for being badass (pretty undeserved, to be honest, he hadn't actually ever done anything) plus being the son of a police officer could help...

His thoughts stopped on their tracks.

He was the son of a police officer. That was a very small detail that had escaped him, probably because most of the time it was just that: a small detail. A piece of background information. He kicked himself mentally as he sat down with his eternally bored look.

 _Okay, this was information we hadn't integrated into our model_ , Practical said. _How does it change our position?_

 _Well,_ Test It replied, _not much. But we'll have to be careful with this notebook. I suggest we remove the first page, the one with the instructions, ASAP. We should burn the page removed, too, not leave it in some trash can. Further, it'd be better if we removed every sheet we filled and did the sa-_

 _Hold on,_ his moral side spoke up. _You're actually thinking of filling a whole sheet?!_

 _Ummm..._

 _That's beyond the point,_ interrupted Practical. _We have just found new information. If we just pretend to include it and then carefully justify why we're going to do the same thing anyway, we might as well just give up collecting information and do whatever we like._

 _But there really isn't much of a change,_ explained Common Sense. _Removing those pages was a good idea anyway, and we'd probably have thought of it sooner or later. Other than that, if we're careless enough that the fact that we're the son of a police officer starts mattering we've already lost._

His internal monologue (or dialogue?) was interrupted by a piece of chalk hitting his forehead and his teacher asking him to pay attention to class.

"Ah- sorry, sensei!" he replied, and promptly shifted his thoughts to a more class-welcoming pattern.

* * *

 _4:02PM._

After class he decided he'd go for a walk and maybe buy some manga. He needed some time to think.

 _We're removing the instructions page from the notebook. What else?_ Practical asked.

 _Well, the cover itself is pretty awful. I say we remove that, too. And maybe we cross out the name of yesterday's guy. And today's person,_ Test It replied. Light made a mental note about that. This part he'd labelled Test It was way too eager to do what would generally be considered bad.

But was it, really? Hadn't he thought, his whole life, that humanity was almost hopeless? And now he had a tool for Hope. He chewed on these thoughts as he entered the small shop and his second victim showed up.

"Hey, lady, wanna come hang out with us?" Light took note of the voice and the tone which had followed the sound of a few bikes arriving. He got in and chose a specific section of the manga shelves, not bothering to look at what section it was. He just wanted to be facing the window as the thugs - there was more than one - harassed a young girl outside. The one whose voice he had noted had shoulder-length dirty blond hair and was wearing shades, bright gold jewelry and a biker jacket.

"Whoa, Taku-san is going after a hottie!" Light heard through the door he'd strategically left slightly open to his left.

"Shibumaru Takuo, they call me Shibutaku," the man said, pointing a thumb to himself with a smug grin. "Hehe... go out with me, lady."

 _Do it. You already have inform-_

 _Shut up. He's just harassing a girl with words,_ Light replied while the other three thugs cheered on their "leader." That's not deserving of death.

 _Is anything...?_ His moral side spoke up again in a whisper that was promptly ignored by the rest of him.

He opened a random manga and put his notebook in it, pretending to read it while he watched and waited.

"Come on, hottie, come with us!"

"No!" the girl said and tried getting away with no success.

"Hehehe... you better do what Taku said! He doesn't take no for an answer!" One of the nondescript thugs howled at that. Light's left eyebrow twitched, and his impassiveness became a frown when the "leader" tried to put a hand under the girl's coat.

 _That's it,_ Light thought as he quickly wrote the name he'd heard with 4 different possible spellings, always with the face of the thug in his mind. _The cause of death has to be specific enough to cover a tiny prior,_ he thought and looked around casually, glancing at both sides of the street.

Empty.

 _Run over by a truck,_ he wrote beside each instance of the guy's name.

Then he waited. That tingling sensation was there again. His hands once more were shaking. Not with anticipation, not with fear, not with shock. With rage.

Okay, maybe just a little bit of anticipation.

 _Are you sure you want to kill an innocent person?_ Moral asked.

 _He's not innocent,_ Test It answered. _He's actually trying to rape that girl._

 _Does that make him deserve to die?_

 _Yes._ This time, all other parts of Light agreed with Test It. Rape could sometimes be worse to the psychological development of a person than going to war. Some people never recovered, never managed to regain a regular life again. He could absolutely destroy this girl's life. But he wouldn't. Not anymore.

"Let go of me!" the girl said, and exactly five minutes after Light wrote the third variation of the name, she managed to get a hold of her purse and grabbed a can of pepper spray, pointing it at Takuo's face and looking defiant.

Takuo barked at that and tapped his shades. "You think this is going to work?" All four of them laughed, and Light heard the sound of a truck in the distance.

Six minutes. He was no longer pretending to read his manga. He watched and waited, sweating again.

Suddenly, as if inspired by some divine providence, the girl turned around and used the spray on one of the other thugs, one who wasn't wearing shades, and kicked Takuo's knee, who yelped and let go in surprise. She ran.

"AAAH! THAT BITCH!" said the one who was hit by the spray.

"SHE'S GETTING AWAY! GO GET HER!" said another one, and Takuo immediately climbed onto his bike.

Six minutes, thirty-five seconds. "You slut! I'll get you!" He kicked the bike into gear and accelerated.

Six minutes, thirty-eight seconds. The truck was finally visible.

Six minutes, thirty-nine seconds. "TAKU! LOOK OUT!"

Six minutes, forty seconds. The front of the truck hit the bike, killing the thug on impact.

Light's vision started to swim again, and he felt faint. He kept watching the scene in shock as people who heard the accident started to gather. The girl was long gone, and the other thugs started cursing and quickly left, too. Light followed suit.

* * *

 _4:31PM._

 _The death note is real._

 _The death note is real._

 _The death note is real._

That's all that went through his mind as he scrambled to his house, and when he was near enough, he slowed down as more coherent thoughts started to form.

 _I've killed two people..._

He walked into an alley and threw up. His stomach was still churning, and he felt chills going through his body, as if he had a fever. His breath was coming in fast, ragged pieces, and his whole body was shaking as he propped himself against the wall.

 _What have I done? How can this be real?_ This part of him didn't seem to have a name. It was just raw feeling. He stared at the floor, trying not to fall. Everything he believed was false...

 _There must be some other explanation!_

 _You know there isn't,_ the guy he used to call Test It said. But now... maybe he should call him Death. _It was the death note, and you know it._

Yes... he knew it. That didn't make it any less terrifying.

He tried to assimilate that and couldn't. In his hands there was an artifact so powerful it could modify the state of the world in order to cause the death of anyone he wished. He could... he could... Hmm... what else could he do? What were the limits of that? And why was he feeling like that? He knew the world was now a slightly better place because he'd murdered those two.

 _No. It's not murder. It's justice._

Why was that happening, then? But he knew the answer. No matter what his verbal, conscious side said about it, his raw lizard brain still existed and still reacted the way it was supposed to react to taking two human beings' lives.

 _I have to... to go home._

* * *

 _4:50PM._

And he did. He got home. And he had dinner as if nothing had happened, though he ate more than he usually did. Then he went to his room and immediately ripped off the death note's cover, back, instruction page and first page just for good measure. No one could know.

He stripped and went to the shower. He let the hot water wash over him, his mind completely blank. Until it wasn't.

 _We killed two men._

 _We cold bloodily killed two men._

 _We took their lives._

 _We murdered them._

 _We're murderers._

 _We're monsters._

 _No,_ Death replied. _We're not. They were monsters. They were the rot of this world._

 _Do you think Takuo deserved to die?_ Some unnamed part of him asked.

 _Yes. Don't you? He was going to rape that girl. What do you think he deserved?_ Death replied. _Is the world a worse place, now that he's gone?_

No one answered.

 _What's the price, though?_ Another part finally spoke up. _Our sanity? Our mind?_

 _Is it such a high price to pay? For the betterment of the world? Do you think our mind isn't a fair, even cheap price? Do you really believe, O Master of Morality, that losing our mind while at the same time making the world a better place for everyone else isn't worth it? Are you as selfish as everyone else?_

 _But it's all we have,_ Practical said. _It's all we are. If we give it up, who are we? And how could we go on, without it?_

 _Do we need to give it up, though? You've always said you wanted to change the world. To make it a place worth living. Here's your chance. Are you going to throw it away?_

Again, no answer for a while.

 _Would you trust anyone else with this?_ Death continued, softly, his voice tempting. _Just think in utilitarian terms. Sure, killing is bad... but those people deserved it. The world is a better place without them. Do you know anyone else who would use these powers... for good? Unselfishly? You're thinking it right now. You were thinking it. You were thinking of unselfishly sacrificing our mind for the greater good._

 _Do you think anyone could be a better shinigami than you?_

* * *

 _4:16PM. December 3, 2003._

Five days later, Light got home from school and went to his room, locking his door behind himself as he was wont to do in the past few days. He grabbed a nondescript white notebook from his backpack and opened it. There were two pages missing, looking like they had been ripped off. On the first remaining page, there were two names followed by the words "heart attack," same date and different times. They were an hour apart and in two different languages. The date and time of the second one would happen in four minutes. He booted his computer, switched to the virtual machine and opened a nice little text document with many more names and locations on it.

That was when the actual shinigami showed up.

"Curious," a voice behind Light said, and he screamed and fell off his chair. The voice laughed.

"Light? Are you okay?" Light's mother's voice was heard from downstairs.

"Yes! It's just one of those online scare games!"

"Why are you so surprised? I'm the owner of the death note, shinigami Ryuk. Seems like you've realized that ain't no normal notebook." The creature that said those words looked like... a seven feet tall punk clown, to be quite descriptive. Its face was white, it wore leather and there was skull-themed jewelry here and there, including a huge belt and one golden skull earring. Its mouth was painted with what looked like the Joker's finest quality lipstick and the slightly open smile showed razor-sharp teeth. Its hair was pitch black and it had a somewhat hunched posture. The most salient feature, however, were his enormous red eyes that seemed to see through your soul.

Light slowly calmed himself down with deep breaths, and stood up. "I'd thought it was a metaphor for the user, but apparently it's not. So shinigami are real, eh? It's a pleasure to meet you, Ryuk."

The shinigami looked at bit uneasy at the matter-of-fact tone of Light and his speedy recovery of the shock. "Ehh... the pleasure is mine?"

"I am Yagami Light. I have a few questions for you."

"Oh?" Ryuk's facial expression should be unreadable - very few muscles actually moved -, but Light could identify curiosity and amusement on its face nonetheless.

 _Careful..._

"What happens to me, now?"

"What?"

"I killed a bunch of people, but I'm not a shinigami. Is there any punishment? Do I become a shinigami?"

"Huh? What do you mean? I won't do anything to you."

That seemed to catch Light by surprise, though not too much. "Not... do anything?"

"Once the death note lands in the human world, it belongs to that world. It's now yours."

That gave Light pause. "Interesting. I see."

"If you don't want it, give it to someone else. But if you do that, I'll erase your memories concerning the death note. Also, you won't be able to see me." As the strange creature - who had wings, now Light noticed, leathery feathery wings - explained that, it opened the window and flew to the top of a streetlight. "Because you and only you touched the notebook, you and only you can see and hear me. The death note is the bond that ties the human Yagami Light and the shinigami Ryuk together. For as long as you are alive or want the notebook, you will have it and retain your memories and your ability to see me."

 _Bond... Fascinating._ Light decided to hold off judgment until he had more information, since it seemed to be so forthcoming.

"So... there's no consequence whatsoever to what I'm doing?"

"Oh, well... there's the stress and fear this provokes in a human, suspiciously lacking in you. And also, when you die..." He flew back inside. "I'll write your name on my notebook. And you won't go to either Heaven nor Hell."

"Oh. So Heaven and Hell exist, then?"

Ryuk seemed taken aback. "What?"

"Well, it's one thing to accept the veracity of a killer notebook, but it's a whole other thing to claim there is an afterlife. So you're saying that everyone I kill goes to an afterlife but I won't? And how is that afterlife? Can you tell me?"

Ryuk's eyes were somehow wider. "I... can't. It's against the... the rules." Light marked that behavior as highly suspicious and worthy of further investigation, but changed the subject.

"So, do all death notes come with instructions? You're shinigami, shouldn't you know this already? And why was this death note here? Shouldn't it be with you in... in... Heaven or Hell or wherever it is shinigami live?"

The shinigami looked increasingly surprised and even (Light suspected) pleased. Light still found it very mysterious that he could identify Ryuk's facial expressions with only minute changes in specific locations and suspected maybe he was in fact projecting what he expected to see there. He took note of that, also. "Well... ah... you see," the creature started, and changed its posture. Now, somehow, it started to look menacing, as if the shadows around it had shifted or something. Light was unfazed. "I wrote the instructions in English and dropped the notebook here... because I was bored," it explained. "This may sound weird coming from a shinigami but... I just didn't feel alive. Being a shinigami these days is so boring. We're either sleeping or gambling. You write a few human names in the death note and they laugh at you for working so hard. Killing humans from the shinigami world isn't fun at all. And writing shinigami names in the notebook doesn't do anything. So I figured it'd be more fun to be down here."

There were multiple shinigami. Got it. "Do shinigami..." Then Light realized what time it was and quickly turned around, picking the first name from his list and writing it on the nondescript notebook that was open on his desk, choosing a time of death exactly an hour after the previous one. The shinigami, who was floating without moving his wings, peeked over his shoulder.

"What's that?" it asked. Light turned to look at Ryuk again, relieved he didn't miss his window.

"It's your notebook. Don't you recognize it?"

The shinigami grabbed it without asking and looked at the three names written, the lack of instructions and cover. "What did you do to my notebook?!" Its voice, so calm and steady before, was now loud and angry, almost heavy, and for the first time Light felt threatened. Here was a (probably) thousands of years old supernatural creature angry with him. But he held his pose.

"Well, I couldn't just go around with a dark notebook called 'Death Note' and instructions on how to kill people plus a bunch of names of dead people in it, could I? Especially given my dad's a police officer, that would be too suspicious."

"Ah..." Ryuk sounded as if it hadn't thought of that before. "But there's only three names..."

"Yes, of course, I also removed the pages with the other names. It would be just stupid to leave them here, too. I burned them. Speaking of which," and Light snatched the notebook from an astounded shinigami's hands and used his pen to cross out the two other names many times until they were impossible to read. "Always cover your tracks."

The shinigami's eyes got a bit wider at him, but Light felt he could sense frank admiration there. "Pages? So you already filled pages with this?"

"Well, it was in fact only one page. At first, I thought it'd be better if I just randomly picked a time and place for each victim. If I concentrate all my victims in Kanto, it will soon become obvious that that's a pattern. But choosing random times during the day wouldn't be efficient; the gain isn't proportional to the work. Besides, I couldn't be bothered," he said, his tone a little bit condescending. "I kill one person per hour, and always from a randomly selected time zone in the globe. So the only pattern is temporal, and that wouldn't be enough to actually pinpoint with any accuracy the source. Someone from anywhere could be doing that, so I'm mostly safe."

The shinigami looked too astounded for words for a few seconds, and Light mentally patted himself on the back for this accomplishment: shock a supernatural being to silence. It slowly reached again for the notebook and stared at it. Meanwhile, Light erased from the word document the name he'd just written and grabbed one six-sided die and one four-sided die. He started throwing them and writing down the numbers he got when Ryuk said, "So you've killed 96 people so far."

"Actually, it's a hundred and five, I made a few tests before with some lowly criminals. After I confirmed the power of the notebook, I only needed to know a few more details."

"Criminals?" The shinigami put the notebook back, and Light continued throwing his dice.

"Yes. You see, Ryuk, this world's gotten rotten. Everyone is incredibly selfish, and even those who aren't are nowhere near being efficient at being good. Some people just destroy other people's lives on a whim, like it's no big deal. But with exclusively public information that can be - somewhat - easily found on the internet, I can start cleaning this mess. Of course," he explained, gesticulating with his hands, "I don't just write the name of anyone who pops on the news. I have to make sure they're actually guilty of those crimes and the world will be a better place without them. These are all people about whom I've researched", he pointed to the screen where the list of names and faces was still open, "and who I found to be... bad for society."

"And you put all causes of death as 'heart attack' even though the default is already that," the shinigami observed.

"Yes. If I don't put a cause of death after the name, I can't choose a time of death - I tested it -, and I needed that. Additionally, I don't want people to ignore this. I want them to notice. That's also one of the reasons why I left the temporal pattern. I want them to know I'm passing judgment. I want them to know there's an overlord. If you do evil, you will be punished. That way, no one will do evil anymore!" Light was grinning, and in fact looked a little manic. He hadn't noticed he'd stood up, but standing he was, and even Ryuk looked a little frightened... and very amused. "In fact, evil's just a cool phrase. But someone whose impact on humanity is negative... those deserve to die."

"So you'll be the only evil one left," Ryuk replied, getting more amused as time progressed.

"What are you talking about? I'm the savior," he explained. "I'm Japan's number 1 honor student. And I will be... the god of this world!" Then he started laughing, cackling, really. Until he stopped, and his laugh became more childish. "No, sorry, I'm just kidding. I just want to make the world a better place." He frowned a bit. "Killing is bad. No one should kill. But sometimes... sometimes it's the best thing to do. Batman's insane. Everyone thinks he's some sort of paragon of virtue because he refuses to kill the Joker, but what about all the unnamed, faceless people the Joker kills? They're all on Batman. Batman could stop all that. He could just kill the Joker. But he won't, and much more people are dead because of him.

"I'm not Batman," he explained with a smirk. "And I won't let all those Jokers get their way. I'll make the world better, unlike anything Batman has ever done for Gotham City."

Ryuk's smile widened somehow. _Humans are so... interesting!_

Then Light sat down and asked: "By the way, Ryuk, is there a god? Other than shinigami, that is?"

* * *

 _December 4, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

"That's more than a hundred just this week..."

"From all over the world, it seems!"

"Only criminals, incarcerated or just wanted."

"All of a heart attack..."

"These are only the ones we know, there must be many more!"

Someone, somehow, had access to the cameras of the meeting. He was wearing a plain white shirt and plain blue jeans, sitting on the wooden floor of an empty room except for the computer showing those images. _So Interpol is finally acting... I won't be able to avoid helping the police on a case like this._

* * *

nightelf37: I have all ten chapters (as he didn't seem to create more before going with the rewrite), but I'm posting only the first for the time won't be regular. This fic will probably stay around until either of the following conditions are met: (a) Scientist's Thesis changes his mind about the whole thing, after which I'll do what he requests me to do, (b) this site orders me to take this down, after which I will do so.

See ya on Third!


	2. Chapter 2

nightelf37: After literally actually forgetting I was supposed to do this, and a PM reminder from one Alexis Vance (id number 7037246), I'm gonna re-publish the ten (well, nine since I already put up the first) chapters I have. The text syntax (i.e. which text should be in bold, italicized, or underlined) might change from what it used to be because I can't remember which text should be in what style. Copy-pasting such content into document writing apps doesn't carry over the format, just the text.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scienstist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 2.

* * *

 _A/N: Light mentions the use of Tor. Information about it can be found on its Wikipedia page because this website blocks links._

* * *

 _December 4, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

Flags from all member countries of the ICPO decorated the large room's walls. A large number of desks overlooked an empty dais, with each row of desks on a higher level than the one in front of it. The people sitting at the desks were discussing loudly with each other, which resulted in a complete confusion of ideas, suggestions and thoughts - but mostly just lots of outraged yells.

"The death toll is over a hundred, even just the ones we know of."

"Well, who cares? They're all mass murderers or worse. I say they deserve to die!"

"What did you just say? Are you crazy?"

"Who could do such a thing? The killings are spread all over the world. This must be some huge organization…"

"It's the CIA or the FBI!"

"What did you just say?!"

"We'll have to call L to help us solve this," one voice said silencing them all.

And for a few seconds that silence reigned. Then the murmurs restarted, and once again evolved into a cacophony of parallel conversations.

Most of the chiefs in the room brought an entourage, and on occasion that included a few promising young policemen. One of these, Matsuda Touta, leaned over to his boss, who was following the conversation intently but not participating.

"Who's L, chief?" The young police officer asked Yagami Soichiro.

"Oh, right, this is your first meeting," he whispered back. "L is… a private investigator of sorts. No one knows what their real identity is. They have helped us with many impossible cases in the past. But the thing is, we can't contact them. They're our last resort, and they only come when they're interested."

At that moment, a deep male voice overwhelmed the general noise. "Ladies and gentlemen, L is already on it," it started. Everyone looked at the dais, where the amplified voice had come from, and saw a man wearing an overcoat, a hat and shades that hid his face.

"Who's that?" Matsuda asked.

"That's Watari, L's personal assistant. We also have no idea who he is. L rarely speaks with us and usually just tells Watari what they want."

"L has already started working on this case," he continued, "and is requesting your full cooperation. They believe these deaths are being caused by a mass murderer. The situation is incredibly atypical, however, and without the aforementioned full cooperation we can't begin to hope to solve this." Everyone remained completely silent as Watari spoke. "L says this may be the hardest case they have yet faced, and while they have some idea on how to start the investigation, they believe this murderer may be too smart for normal methods.

"We'll need to be careful, and use every resource available."

* * *

 _4:23PM. December 5, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

"I'm home!" Light called when he arrived. His mother acknowledged his greeting as he went to his bedroom with Ryuk on his tail. After he sat down at his desk, he opened his backpack and took out the nondescript white notebook from it. Ryuk, as always, peeked over his shoulder as he performed his ritual of grabbing the dice and rolling them to decide what time zones he'd take each victim from. "You know, Ryuk, there is a flaw in my anonymity plan."

"Eh?" He sounded surprised. During the past few days, he'd developed a sort of admiration for the human boy, who always seemed to be one step ahead of… everyone, really. He was now floating above the bed, eating an apple; it turns out that while shinigami don't need to eat, Ryuk really enjoyed apples. "What flaw?"

Light waited for Tor (an online anonymity network) to connect on his virtual machine as he explained. "My first victim. He wasn't a famous, big criminal, so only someone living in Japan could have seen him. The sole non-Japanese news I found about him online showed up after his mysterious death. Of course," he continued, "it's possible that some non-Japanese person with the Death Note would pick a Japanese TV station to watch at random, but the odds are pretty low, and I killed him while he was on live TV. Very few people can actually speak Japanese. Even I can only speak Japanese and English, although with translation tools I have access to quite a wide range of online sources." He closed his eyes and thought for a while. Ryuk chewed on his apple, his ever-present creepy smile widening a bit. The slow, deliberate chewing noises irritated Light, but that was just a silly irrational peeve. "I guess there's no way around that. It was a stupid mistake, and I never realized it. It might be a problem. But then again, it might not. Here's to hoping."

The names of the people he'd found and planned to kill were all in a thrice password protected area of his computer that could not—or so he hoped—be accessed while the computer was connected to the internet. He had a word document organized by time zone with the names, faces and crimes of each person. As soon as he wrote their names on the Death Note, he erased them from the document.

"Look at this," Light said as he opened a website to show Ryuk. It had an intricately designed heart pattern with wings, gold against a black background, and presented the text:

 _THE LEGEND OF THE SAVIOR KIRA_

 _Criminals worldwide are dying one after another because Kira is amongst us. He is the one who will tolerate no wickedness, our messenger from Hell. Only those who believe in his existence may enter this site._

"Quite colorful, isn't it? I believe this was from the failed Japanese pronunciation of the word "killer". I'm not sure I like the sound of it," he said, rolling his eyes a little bit, "but websites like this one are popping one after another, and it seems all of them have decided that's my name now." He entered the website and scrolled past a few blog entries as he talked. "Official media still refers to these deaths as 'the strange and frequent heart attacks of heinous criminals,' but there are people who believe—correctly, of course—that someone is behind all this." He turned his chair around to face the shinigami, who had that disturbingly amused look on his face again. Light himself wore a perfectly neutral expression as he talked. "Do you see what this means? It's working. People are aware there's someone. A person behind all this."

"Eh… Light… you told me the other day that you were kidding when you said you wanted to be god. Isn't that a bit god-ish for you?" Ryuk swallowed the last bit of the apple, still floating, and turned upside down.

"Yes, but that's a necessary consequence," explained the boy, smiling at the aerial tricks of the creature. "Whenever people see correlation, they suppose purposefulness—false positives, most of the time. And whenever that purposefulness is vague and threatening, they believe it's a god." He turned around again and closed the browser. Ryuk couldn't see the smile that touched Light's lips for a split second as he read 'SAVIOR KIRA' again. "It's the only reason religions exist in the first place. They saw thunder, they imagined a god of thunder. They saw fire, they imagined a god of fire. Now they see death, and they imagine a shinigami. But I don't mind. They have to know there's someone. They don't have to know who that someone is. I'll be… the Dark Knight." He chuckled to himself.

"We interrupt your programming to bring you an important message from the ICPO. This is being broadcast all over the world." ICPO? Light looked at his TV and turned the volume up so he could listen. Wasn't dad at a meeting there a few days ago? "Japanese voiceover was provided by translator Yoshio Anderson."

"My name is Lind L. Taylor, widely known as 'L.'" The voice came from a man who looked young and had dark, straight hair that framed his face.

* * *

 _December 4, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

Watari's head turned to the general direction of the Japanese entourage, though the shades prevented anyone from seeing the actual focus of his eyes. Still, Yagami believed he could almost feel the gaze on him, and wasn't surprised when the mysterious man spoke.

"Mr. Yagami, L has reason to believe the killer is Japanese. They will need your help. They will try something, just on the off chance that it works. L believes that it's possible they may be overestimating the intelligence of this murderer, but they aren't sure. Therefore, they will attempt to ascertain whether those responsible are really as dangerous as some fear. They want to gauge the killer's intelligence."

* * *

 _4:46PM. December 5, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

 _"To the perpetrator of all these serial murders: you have committed the most abominable act in history. I will personally catch you, the one causing these horrible deaths, at any cost."_

 _Whoa_ , Death said. _That's a threat right there. I think we should do something about it._

 _You know, you're a bit trigger happy_ , Common Sense said. _He's not a murderer. He's an investigator that helps the ICPO. What do you think the result of killing him will be?_

 _Erm…_

 _That's a no_ , Practical agreed.

"Kira, I think I have a pretty good idea of what you're trying to do and why you're doing it. But that is evil!"

 _He's right, you know_ , Moral said.

 _We've been over this already_ , Practical grunted. _Yes, it's "evil" as a general rule—and you should really not throw that word around—but we're doing it only on strict necessity. We're only killing those without whom the world is better off._

 _That's just rationalizing murder_ , pointed out Moral.

 _Maybe so_ , Death said. _But Practical has a point. We're not about to just start questioning our motives, are we? Besides, why do you even call yourself Moral anyway? Your morality is an outdated evolutionary hack. We think you should leave._

 _Aye_ , said Practical.

 _Aye_ , said Common Sense.

 _Aye_ , said Light himself.

There was no answer from Moral.

Light stopped paying attention to the man on the TV, returned the notebook to its place and grabbed his homework. He focused on it for a few minutes, until…

 _But what if he does catch us?_ Death asked after some time, his voice soft and seductive. For a while, no one replied. Then he continued. _If he was stupid enough to show us his face and his name, he couldn't have been a very good asset to the Interpol in the first place. And if he dies, whatever perks he might have that drew the Interpol to him in the first place will be lost._

 _It's a net positive utility._

* * *

 _December 8, 2003. Interpol emergency council._

A few days later, at a new Interpol meeting called by L, Watari was waiting for everyone to sit. When they did, he cleared his throat, and the amplified sound of it made everyone become silent, echoing through the chamber in an authoritative manner.

"L's plan didn't work exactly as he'd expected. They believe the odds that Kira is Japanese are very good." He cleared his throat again. "Lind L. Taylor, to those of you who do not know, was a murderer scheduled to die at the date he showed up on TV pretending to be L in Japan. He died of a heart attack a few hours after his last announcement. Other death sentence victims played the same part in other countries, and many of them died afterwards, too." The sound of whispers now could be heard from everywhere.

"What happened, Chief?" Matsuda asked again.

"L wanted to figure out where in Japan Kira was, so he made this Lind L. Taylor assume their identity and made that announcement in Japan in hopes of luring Kira out somehow. Simultaneous transmissions were made with different criminals appearing on TV all over the globe, mostly to keep up the pretense but also just in case Kira wasn't in fact Japanese. Taylor was the first to die, but every other one of them died too, all of them after their transmission. L believes this is evidence for Kira being Japanese." The director himself looked a bit unconvinced.

"Couldn't Kira have gotten this information by coincidence?"

"He could. I think L must have thought of that, though."

"L will need a team of your top investigators to start immediately." There was a commotion at this. "They believe Mr. Yagami should lead the team. The Interpol should decide on how to best handle this situation. In a week, L will want to hear what you ladies and gentlemen have to say."

Watari then turned and left, while the Interpol organized themselves - which is to say, everyone started to talk at the same time in confusion.

* * *

 _7:12PM. December 5, 2003. Tokyo, Japan._

"That's strange…"

"What is it, Light?" Ryuk floated over to look at Light's computer screen.

It'd been a few hours since Taylor showed up on TV, and he still wasn't dead. "This person doesn't look like… Taylor…" Then he stopped talking and his eyes widened in terror as comprehension dawned on him. _Oh, no… Oh no, no, no…_

On his screen, one of the Savior Kira websites was open, a British one, and it showed a lengthy rant about the Interpol allying with an investigator called L… who was a female and whose name was, apparently, Jane B. Angelo. No, no, no… He looked up other international websites dedicated to Kira and each of them showed a different L. He clicked and clicked and clicked and somehow there was a different L for each couple of countries. Some of them - the USA, England, China, Japan - got one person all for themselves. By then, a number of those websites had picked up on this already and were choosing one of two stances: L was in fact all of those people, or none of them.

Ryuk watched, fascinated and with growing amusement. "Light… I think they got you."

"NO," he said, then stopped himself.

 _I told you_ , Common Sense said.

 _Shut up_ , Death and Light replied.

 _No. You shouldn't just kill people like that. You shouldn't leave the pattern. You made a mistake_ , Practical commented.

 _No…_

 _You made a mistake_ , the voice he used to call Moral continued, _and it was an easily avoidable mistake. Maybe he should call it Cautious._

 _How? How could I—_

 _You know exactly how you could. You're Kira. They would never send the small guns after you. You thought L was just some random pawn and your arrogance turned against you._

"No," he said out loud, but it sounded like a question to his ears. "No, that's nothing. I already suspected they'd learn I was Japanese." He wasn't quite succeeding at convincing himself. His voice was breaking and he was trembling. "I can't kill back in time to change that…" Then he eyed Ryuk suspiciously. "Or can I?"

"Kukuku… We're shinigami, not gods of time," answered the strange creature, looking way too cheerful. Light decided he'd deprive the shinigami of apples for a while. But anyway, he nodded. As he'd suspected.

 _Let's be rational. The mistake has been made. What can be done now to help? And he thought of an idea. He heard a gasp coming from the depths of his mind as it formed, but he quickly reasoned it was necessary. They couldn't know he was Japanese. He'd make it much more difficult. If they caught him, many more people than just that handful of actors would die…_

He spent the next two hours looking up the names of the other Ls around the world and writing their names. After he was done, he ripped the full pages off, put them in his first desk drawer and closed the notebook. Ryuk had spent that entire time watching in fascination. Light looked at himself and felt his clothes sticking to him and his heart racing. His whole body was tense, and he felt he'd just escaped sure death.

"They might still know I'm Japanese, but they might believe this was all random, too."

 _Random murdering of innocents_ , you mean, Moral said. None of the others except for Death, who was quickly shushed, had anything to say to that. It was true.

"L is still alive, and whoever they are, I underestimated their intelligence."

* * *

 _December 15, 2003. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L stared at the monitor as Watari entered the conference room a week later. "Watari," he said as he pressed a key on his computer to let him speak to the man, "ask them to invite Klein to the team in Japan."

* * *

 _9:02AM. December 16, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami Soichiro was a tall, powerful man. His greying hair, square glasses, moustache, and usual grey suit gave him a very professional look. He sat at a desk in the headquarters of the recently created Vicious Criminal Serious Murder Special Investigative Force, or informally Kira Task Force, in Tokyo. Watari was sitting at the back with a notebook and his face covered as usual. The other investigators, from all over the world, every now and then glanced nervously in his direction. He seemed not to notice, focused on whatever was on his screen.

"Yagami-sama, we have the report ready," one of the investigators told him.

"Let's hear it. Watari-san," he said that last word a little bit louder, "you might want to let L hear this, too."

Watari almost imperceptibly nodded and turned on the relay. "L, you will now hear the report."

"Good," the electronically distorted voice was heard by Watari only.

"All the victims were discoverable from Japan, but only through the internet—that is, they were also discoverable from anywhere else with an internet connection. They were all people arrested for or suspected of heinous crimes such as planned murder, rape, and torture. None of them were people who committed one-shot impassioned crimes or accidents. The times of death were always during the first minute of each hour of the day. The places these victims come from seem to follow a statistically random pattern as opposed to what a layman would believe a random process should look like. During the collecting of the data, there were some windows between deaths that were longer than an hour, but most of them were eventually filled by a death that hadn't been previously noted. Currently there are still some hours of some days that don't correspond to any murders on record, but more information is being gathered as we speak."

An apprehensive silence followed that report, which eventually was broken by Watari. "L wants to know what parts of the published information of the victims all of them had in common."

"Apparently, name, location, and picture of the criminal and description of the crime are the only features that are found consistently amongst all victims, with the one notable exception of Lind L. Taylor, whose name was mentioned only briefly in a few news outlets in the U.S.A. and whose face only became public during the announcement," the one reporting the data promptly replied. Then, another investigator got up and started their report.

"So far, we've received 3029 calls regarding the case. The vast majority are from curious civilians wanting to know whether the broadcast, L, and Kira are real. Fourteen calls were along the lines of 'I know Kira' and 'I saw Kira.' We've followed up and recorded all of them. Twenty-one calls were from people claiming to be Kira, which were also followed up and recorded."

After that, one young officer got up and the other investigator sat down. Matsuda Touta was a man of average height and build and straight black hair. His face was somewhat childish and beardless, though his posture and suit were serious and his tone was very down-to-business. "In the past few days, criminal activity all over the world has decreased dramatically. There seems to be no order to the decrease, but it can be more strongly detected in most countries where the general populace has access to news concerning the case."

The uneasy silence was somehow loud after that, heavy. The investigators traded glances but it seemed they were afraid to even breathe. Once again, Watari broke it. "L wants to be sent a copy of the full report, and wants to know whether Klein has arrived."

This time, Yagami was the one who answered. "The report will be sent through whatever forms of communication L chooses to disclose to us." His tone of voice was dry and somewhat resentful. "Meike Klein hasn't arrived yet, but her flight is scheduled for tonight. She should be here in two days at most."

Watari remained silent for a few seconds before saying, "L will be looking forward to working with Klein and with the team already assembled. They thank you for all your effort, and say they believe that with this information, this case may not be unsolvable after all." The effect of that one statement was subtle, but instantaneous. The wording was carefully chosen, of course. It implied even L had had no expectations of solving it, but what they'd learned had given him hope, so further developments would likely point them in the right direction. As Watari closed his laptop and got up to leave, the mood in the room had perceptibly improved, and people seemed to have recovered the drive to work.

* * *

 _6:16PM. December 16, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"So the solution of the quadratic equation is really just a consequence of the way it's set, see? If you ever forget it, you can just re-derive it from that," Light explained to his young sister Sayu in his room. Ryuk watched the exchange, looking bored, floating above the bed.

"You're so smart, Light-kun! The sensei should've taught us that! All he did was throw that formula on the board and tell us to memorize it!" She puffed her cheeks and Light laughed.

"Yes, but now you can teach all your friends!" They heard the noise of the door being unlocked downstairs. "Oh, dad's home. We should go down to have dinner with him."

"Yes!" she replied and quickly got up and moved towards the door.

"But Sayu, you need to practice! If you don't do the exercises, you won't remember."

"Gotcha," she said as she left, followed by Light and Ryuk.

"I'm home!" Light heard his dad saying as he walked downstairs. "Hello, Sayu, Light."

"Hi dad!" Sayu greeted and hugged him.

"Hello, dad. Let's eat?"

"Sure, I'll be right there," answered Yagami Soichiro.

 _6:27PM._

"So, Light, how's school?" Soichiro asked between bites.

"Eh? Ah, same ol', same ol'…" he replied with poorly concealed pride.

"So, still at the top of the class," his dad said with a chuckle. "And you, Sayu?"

She had been grinning at her brother, but then stopped and held back a snicker. "Oh, same ol', same ol'…" Everyone laughed.

A few more minutes passed in silence until Light said, "Hey, dad, how's the Kira case going?"

"Kira case?" Ryuk asked, surprised. He was floating just behind Light, who ignored him.

"It's like trying to catch a ghost. This guy's really careful."

The corner of Light's lips twitched imperceptibly, but luckily no one was looking when that happened. "Do you have any clues? Any ideas?"

"Now, Light, I know you want to work at the police when you grow up, but this case is classified. I can't disclose this information to you or anyone. I'm sorry, it's not that I don't trust you, but rules are rules."

"I'm sorry," Light said, sounding the teeniest bit bitter. That, Soichiro caught.

"I know you want to help, and your help has been invaluable in the past, but this case is strictly confidential, and not even the investigators working on it have full access to all the info."

"I understand. Don't worry about it," Light replied with a smile. "I'm just being silly."

"This is so interesting…" Ryuk remarked to no one.

 _7:00PM._

"Eh, Light, your dad is not only a cop, but he's also working on the Kira case, huh? That must be quite a lot of pressure," Ryuk commented with mock concern as they walked back into his room—or rather, Light walked and Ryuk hovered.

"Quite the contrary. It means I can use his computer to figure out details of the case. In fact, I can assess exactly how much of a threat this L can be. Their plan was much smarter than I'd suspected, putting an actor to pretend he's them and confirm my location." His lips twisted then, and his brows furrowed. Light had looked up the names of the people who L had used as puppets. They'd all been found guilty of exactly the type of crimes Kira despised. So they weren't innocents.

 _It wasn't that bad, was it?_ Death asked tentatively.

 _You didn't know that. You just killed a bunch of people you thought were innocent. Because of your pride and arrogance._ Moral once again was the last to speak, and even Light himself felt his stomach churn as he thought these things at himself.

"I won't let him catch me by surprise like that again," he said, and smiled a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. Ryuk shuddered at the sight. The human boy looked more terrifying than a shinigami.

 _If this L person is helping the police… I wonder who they are._

* * *

 _8:59AM. December 17, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

There was a knock on the door of the headquarters. Without waiting for an answer, the door was opened, and an austere-looking woman walked in. She was in her thirties, tall, and—in spite of the cold hardness of her face—beautiful. She wore glasses and her blond hair was wrapped in a ponytail. Her suit was black, and her high heels clicked against the floor as she walked with confident, strong steps.

"How may I help you?" Yagami asked, the shadow of a frown forming on his face because of the stranger's interruption.

"I believe L requested my help. I am Meike Klein," she answered in a strongly accented Japanese. "I am a psychologist, anthropologist, and criminal profiler." She talked like she walked: confidently, surely, strongly. Her voice was loud and clear, and even through her thick accent it was always possible to understand what she was saying. There was a small smile on her face, a smile that said 'I'm good at what I do, I know it, you know it, and it makes you furious'.

Everyone looked a bit shocked at the woman's presence, except for Yagami himself. "Yes, of course. Do you want the report?"

"No need. L has already sent me the relevant details. I believe we can further this investigation and significantly narrow down the possible suspects." Watari watched the woman, and the webcam attached to his laptop showed a gleeful L the image of her arrival. "They have asked me to profile this criminal so we can find him. When can I start?"

"Following the report," Yagami answered. "Matsuda?"

Matsuda got up, and his tone was the same down-to-business one of before. He wanted to be taken seriously by his peers, who judged him because of his age. His ambition and drive did him credit, however, and even Klein raised her eyebrows at the power the young man emanated. "The pattern has continued. Twenty registered deaths in the past twenty-four hours, hourly except for a few missing spots. Previous missing spots were filled with other confirmed deaths by heart attack of criminals in more remote parts of the world. Nothing more to report."

"Thank you, Matsuda. Klein-sama, would you care to elucidate us on this murderer's personality?"

"Certainly." Matsuda sat down again while Klein walked to Yagami's desk at the other end of the room and turned around, her back to Yagami but facing everyone else—Watari included. "Our killer is likely male, between 20 and 34 years of age, based simply on general statistics. He is brilliant and knows that, but he is also arrogant and prideful, and very methodical and meticulous. His murder of Taylor and the other fake Ls shows that he doesn't like being challenged, and will kill even when he doesn't know his target is a criminal if he believes that will help him achieve his goals. His goals, of course, are to rid the world of evil. He believes he is doing a purging, a cleansing, and might even fancy himself a supreme judge over humanity. He has cleverly hidden his identity by killing always one person per hour, never concentrating his murders at any single time frame that might incriminate him. That also suggests his reach is temporal in addition to spatial."

"H-hold on," one investigator said. "You're saying that all of this was caused by only one person? And he can kill whomever and whenever he wants? How?"

"Bear with me," Klein answered patiently. "Yes, we believe it is a single person, or perhaps one person heading a team. But the mastermind is only one, yes. Though of course we are not certain of this, it's the most likely scenario. Groups of people are agents with patterns of behavior that are remarkably different from individuals. The kind of mistakes made, and the overall structure of the murders, they point to a single person with a specific ritualistic M.O. Indeed, other than the characteristics of this case that make it peculiar—the spatial and temporal separation of victims, the manner of killing, the sheer amount of victims—the model of the killer as an individual is the most restrictive and predictive." She nodded as she explained that last part. "Of course, we cannot completely rule out that it is, in fact, a group of people instead of only one person. But that—I believe—will become clear as we continue investigating. If we ever reach a point where our model of the killer as an individual mastermind fails and our observations are better explained by a group, we can switch models. But I feel confident in saying that this will not happen.

"As to how he does it… we can't rule out very advanced technology, but all autopsies so far revealed natural causes. I beg your suspension of disbelief here. L and I have come to the conclusion that… the means may be supernatural." Her mouth twitched at that, L noticed through the webcam.

 _Yes, I know it's hard to swallow… but it looks like the most plausible option_ , L thought as he saw the room fall into disarray and chaos.

"Supernatural? What do you mean?"

"Is he a demon?"

"What if he's really a god? A shinigami?"

"Don't be silly, there's no such—"

"He's killing people all over the world with heart attacks! It's the only explanation."

"Silence!" Yagami shouted, and everyone quieted down immediately. His face held a deep frown, wrinkling his foreheads and pursing his lips. "Please, let Klein-san continue."

"Thank you," she replied. "Yes, supernatural. The victims are completely randomly distributed, all dying of heart attacks in the first sixty seconds of each hour. These victims range from those in solitary confinement to those being tried, including some who were cleared of all charges and even some that were missing." Her lips pressed into a thin line as she thought about what to say, how to explain. "As I said, we cannot rule out extremely advanced technology, and it's simply true that the supernatural has incredibly low priors. But however he does it, it is clear that Kira is capable of deeds that would not be thought possible by ordinary means. Even if it's not supernatural, we should label it as such at least as a mental warning that we have absolutely no idea how he is doing it." She let that sink in, let the people murmur, whisper, talk. It was better that way. When she felt they had mostly digested the news, she continued with the good ones. "He has, however, not been perfectly careful. If he has such fine control over time of death, that probably means he somehow schedules the deaths beforehand. But it seems like he creates that schedule at a regular rate, instead of having scheduled all those deaths at some point in the past and just watching them happen." A few murmurs started at that. "If that were the case, most deaths would take a few days to happen after the victims showed up on the news. Taylor and the other fake Ls are the prime examples of people dying on the same day their faces appear on the news, followed by people who appeared much earlier. This line of reasoning assumes that he cannot change the schedule after he set it, and we believe this is the case because otherwise he wouldn't have had any reason to kill the other fake Ls immediately afterwards unless it was to cover his blunder with Taylor once he found out." The murmurs got louder. "The only way to keep it watertight like this while at the same time updating it with recent information would be to recreate the schedules at least daily."

The murmurs were now open conversation, but one investigator asked something that made everyone else quiet down again: "And how do you know all that?"

Klein smiled. "There's a reason we talk about a Modus Operandi when we describe serial killers. They all have a preferred form of killing, and a ritual. They are highly organized people, and generally can be very upset if their carefully built plan is somehow messed with. This killer shows that with his strict obedience to time of death. Always the first minute of every hour.

"I do not believe, as some of you have suggested, that he's a supernatural creature. A shinigami or something like that. That's because of a simple application of Occam's Razor. A supernatural agent would beg too many burdensome details, the posterior probability of it is still incredibly low even if we're considering supernatural means. Why would the creature act now and not at any other point? What would have changed? Too many improbabilities stacked one on top of the other. Of course, we can't rule it out, not yet anyway. But if it is a supernatural creature and not a human, this investigation will have to change dramatically to find a sentient species that has been able to hide for the entire history of humanity. So let's assume it's a human until and unless the evidence tells us otherwise: the posteriors are still much less than we should consider given our current evidence."

"And how does that help us?"

"I second that question," Yagami said. "I'm not sure how that information can help us catch him."

"His first kill didn't fit the pattern," Klein answered. "His first murder was a man named Otoharada Kurou—you can look him up—and it was made during the screening of the crime on TV. And after that one, it took another couple of days for him to actually start his schedule."

Watari cleared his throat, and then spoke. "L believes we can get clues from that murder. And there might possibly have been others. Indeed, L believes Kira may have been testing his powers at that time. If he had already had complete information about what he could do, he wouldn't have been so sloppy."

This time, for the first time, a few investigators, including Yagami and Matsuda, were nodding at Watari's announcement instead of just staring dumbfounded.

L saw all that through the webcam. _Good_ , he thought. _They're catching up. We can't have people who are constantly surprised at the most obvious developments and ideas. They will be a hindrance instead of an aid._

"Matsuda. I need you to head a small unit to research possible other deaths of criminals between Otoharada Kurou and Gabriel Heinsterr." A grin crossed Matsuda's young face before being replaced by his usual serious expression.

 _He wanted to show he was responsible_ , L believed, and just nodded as he started gathering people he trusted.

L smiled at the whole exchange behind his computer screen. Matsuda looked very promising, and Captain Yagami remembered by heart the names of the first recorded victims. L hadn't been wrong to choose that man to head this team, and apparently he wasn't much less picky with his own. "Is there anything else we should be informed of, L? Klein-san?"

"As far as I'm aware, we're done for now. I would like to be notified if any further patterns are found in the deaths," Klein answered.

"L says you should, once again, pay especially close attention to the times of death of these criminals," Watari said, then closed his laptop and got up, walking toward the exit.

* * *

 _5:30PM._

Yagami was the last to leave the headquarters. When he did, he was surprised to find Watari standing beside the door. "Yagami-sama. Do you mind if we speak in private?"

"Not at all. My office?"

The headquarters was in the police building, and Yagami's office was on the top floor of that building. They headed in that direction, and as they walked in, Yagami locked the door and said, "Please, sit." Watari did as instructed while the chief sat on the other side of the now mostly empty desk. Since this case began, it hadn't seen much use. Now, he spent most of his time at the headquarters. "What do they have in mind?"

"L believes this team is too large. Too many non-expert people, too slow on the uptake. We need only the best minds on this team."

"Yes," Yagami sighed, "I agree. The team needs a reduction. And tighter security. I didn't keep any of the case files in my personal computer as I generally do—it's just too dangerous, and most of my cases aren't classified anyway—but there are still too many ways this could leak."

L, who was always watching Watari's actions, watched his respect for the man grow. "What do you suggest?"

"I'll handle it. Don't worry. Was there anything else?"

"No, that was all. Thank you for your time, Yagami-sama."

* * *

 _5:02PM._

"You're looking agitated, Liiiiight-kuuuun. What's up, Liiiiiiight?" Ryuk floated and ate an apple as he watched Light pace around his room. After his ritual, the boy had tried doing his homework, but failed and started fidgeting and pacing instead.

He didn't answer. There was a mental debate going on in his mind. _There had been no update to my father's computer's case folder in more than two weeks_ , Light thought.

 _Do you think he's onto us? Do you think he's hiding it from us?_ Death asked, sounding worried.

 _Don't be silly_ , Common Sense replied. _This is the most important case of his career. We have killed more than two hundred and eighty people. Have you ever heard of a serial killer with this many murders? Especially in such a short time?_

Light slowed down his pace and smiled a bit when he thought of that, but then immediately frowned. _We're not serial killers. We're justice._

 _We're killing people in series_ , explained Common Sense, slowly and carefully. _We even have an M.O.! We're serial killers. The fact that our killing is just doesn't make it any less killing. Don't try to pretend you don't know that. Don't try to diminish what we're doing. We are killing people, and that is bad._

 _Yes, but it's a necessary evil! We're not the Batman, if we have the power to st—_

 _Yes, we know about the Batman_ , Practical interjected impatiently. _The fact that these killings, in the end, have a positive impact doesn't mean killing is a good thing. Never forget that. They are people who didn't want to die, same as us, same as everyone else._

 _But they deserved it_ , Death said.

 _Yes. They did_ , Practical conceded.

 _We're drifting from the subject here. Without dad's computer, we won't know anything about the investigation. That will leave us vulnerable._

They all thought about that. Practical said, _We need to hack into the police's computers, then._

 _Oh, like it's easy?_ Common Sense replied with annoyance. _It's one thing to hack into your dad's personal computer at home, but trying to get into the über protected servers of the police? Insane._

None of his parts had any reply to that. It was insane. Hacking into the police computers wasn't an option.

"Light?" Ryuk sounded concerned. He snapped out of his internal dialogue.

"Sorry. I was thinking. My dad's computer doesn't have information on the case anymore. I'll have to find another way to get my information."

"…how?" the shinigami asked, curious. Light frowned a little bit. He didn't know.

* * *

 _9:01AM. December 18, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"What's this?" Yagami asked the three investigators who just put letters on his desk and were standing in front of it, staring at him. One of them was Matsuda, who looked fearful and nervous.

"This is our resignation letter!" Matsuda said. Yagami's eyebrows shot up and his eyes widened, his mouth slightly slacking.

"W-what? Why?!"

"Everyone has noticed it by now, haven't they?" one of the other investigators, dressing smartly in a green suit with his black hair perfectly combed around his head and eternally tired eyes, said. "Kira is a supernatural killer, and Klein and L may talk a lot of shop, but they're not police. They don't have to go out there and investigate; their names aren't tied to the case. L doesn't even have a name." He inhaled deeply, gathered his courage, then said, "I'm doing this because I fear for my life! I would like to be reassigned to another case, but if that cannot be done, we quit this case." Yagami looked too stunned for words. Watari and everyone else watched the exchange in silence.

"But Matsuda… why? You, too?"

"Y- yes, chief." Matsuda seemed to waver, his serious façade dropping an inch, showing how young he really was. Only eight years older than Yagami's own son. "I-I can't. I'm too young. I'm not even married yet; I haven't done anything. Kira can reach all of us. He killed Taylor when Taylor pretended to be L and to be hunting him. It's only a matter of time."

"Why now?!"

"Because we're getting close, chief," said the third man, the one who hadn't spoken yet. He was tall and very muscular, with a strong jaw and fierce eyes. The fearful expression looked out of place on his face. "Because we might actually have to hunt him, and if he finds out… he'll kill us. He'll kill all of us."

"I hope you can understand and forgive us," Matsuda said, and the three of them turned around and left. Yagami realized he had at some point thrown his chair back and was now standing, paralyzed in shock. Only Watari noticed, however, the small flicker of the chief's eyes in his direction.

* * *

nightelf37: Extreme apologies for the wait. See ya on Third!


	3. Chapter 3

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scienstist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 3.

* * *

 _A/N: Once again I want to thank my Betas for all their help. Also, if you like this fic, hate this fic, think it's kinda sorta okay-ish, I'd love to hear all about it in the reviews._

* * *

 _A/N 2: You really, really should pay attention to the timestamps. They include location, date, time, etc, and without them this chapter can be quite confusing._

* * *

 _A/N 3: Just so that the confusion generated by HPMoR's doesn't repeat here, Light's What is not supposed to be a question nor have a quotation mark._

* * *

 _A/N 4: I have modified a little bit the part where L thinks to make some things clearer. Illusion of transparency, sorry!_

* * *

 _9:05AM. December 18, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

As the three left, Klein looked dumbfounded and everyone else started whispering and talking.

"Are they right? What if he gets us?"

"He can kill anyone, anywhere. He can just find us if we start looking too hard."

"Is this the right thing to do…?"

Yagami slowly sat back on his chair, looking older than he ever had. For the first time, Klein looked frightened as Watari stood up and talked. "Ladies and gentlemen. We would not like this position to be forced on you. If you feel threatened or you want to leave, you are free to do so. No one will think less of you, and your honor will remain unsullied." He waited for his words to sink in, and then Yagami continued, looking grim and sad. "Tomorrow, we will meet again here at the same time. Anyone who does not wish to continue in this team is free to simply not show up tomorrow. If you do so, I will accept it and—if you are a Japanese officer—I will reassign you to another case. Do not feel pressured to continue working on this." He sighed and closed his eyes. "This meeting is over."

Everyone seemed uneasy at that since they'd all just arrived. But one look at the chief's face was enough to make nobody want to stay there. They'd have a free day, apparently.

* * *

 _8:49AM. December 19, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

The next day, Yagami Soichiro arrived at the headquarters to find that about a third of the investigators were missing. Matsuda and the other two were amongst them. The room went deathly silent as Yagami walked to his desk and sat on his chair with his eyes closed. He put both elbows on the desk and wrapped his fingers together, a carefully neutral expression on his face. When he opened his eyes, they quickly scanned the faces present and caught a signal from Watari: the man shook his head once.

"We're ready for today's report," Yagami said. Klein was sitting close to Watari, and for the first time she looked scared. However, she still had the steel under her fear.

One of the investigators who had been under Matsuda before he'd left stood up. Her eyes were intense and her brows were furrowed. "There were twenty-two confirmed heart attacks of criminals in the past twenty-four hours. Their information is included in the report." Her lips trembled. Her voice was one shade short of breaking and her hands were clenched into tight fists. "There were three anomalies, however." Everyone sat straighter as she explained. The air became heavy with foreboding, and even Watari looked up from his laptop. If his body language was anything to go by, he was very interested. "Three of the criminals wrote notes right before they died. One of them wasn't even caught. He was a wanted serial arsonist who walked with his hands up into the police headquarters of his city - Veracruz, Mexico - dropped the note, and then had a heart attack in front of the officers."

"What notes?" Yagami asked.

"They were curiously all written in English," said the investigator as she handed the chief copies of their content attached to pictures of their originals, "and in the form of lyric verses." Yagami quickly scanned the messages but chose to study them later. After a few seconds of silence, the investigator continued. "About yesterday's investigations, between this streak of murders and the first death four other criminal heart attacks were recorded."

* * *

 _5:13PM. November 28, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

 _The instructions say 6 minutes 40 seconds_ , Practical mused. _That's a whole lot of time to write details of death._

 _Well, they do give you forty whole seconds just to write cause of death. Maybe they're being cautious about the time it takes someone to write stuff_ , Common Sense hypothesised.

 _And you can only write the details after you write cause of death, it would seem. But I wonder how much you can mess with the order otherwise?_ Practical continued.

 _Not only that_ , Death said, _but also how much detail we can put into our description._

Light was drying himself as he thought about that. He was tall for his age, and lean, with the barest hint of muscle definition given to him by his haphazard Aikido training. He had brown eyes and hair, which was always a bit too long and falling in front of his eyes. He seemed not to mind it, though, and other than that it was perfectly combed. He was a very handsome boy even at the awkward age of seventeen, but he never thought about it unless it was to get annoyed by the number of people from school that dropped hints about how much they would love to go out with him.

He left the bathroom, put on some more comfortable clothes and sat again at his desk. He opened the first drawer and looked at the mess he'd made with the stuff he'd ripped off the death note.

* * *

5:17PM. Test number 1.

Now that he was calmer, he grabbed the page where he'd written his first eight names and looked at it. Otoharada Kurou, no cause of death stated, and Shibumaru Takuo, written in four different ways, all of them followed by the words "Run over by a truck." He turned on the TV and tried to find a news channel that was talking about someone who deserved to die. He found a chase happening in the USA, being followed by the news' helicopter. The criminal—Albert Hanson, 34—had just robbed a bank and killed two people. Now he was driving a stolen car, trying to flee. It was hopeless, of course.

Now that was a potential victim, but that didn't automatically mean he deserved to die. He might've been spooked, he might've killed those people in self-defence. So Light looked the man up online. It wasn't hard to find the news cover of the whole affair: he'd had a partner who would be the driver. Inside the bank, he shot one of the workers there even after the money had been taken; and when they were surrounded, he took one person as a hostage to go to his car, and as soon as he got there he shot the person instead of letting them go. His partner was killed during a shooting at the beginning of the chase, and now he was alone. This was clearly a man who deserved to die.

Light's first test was to see whether the sheet that wasn't attached to the death note anymore had any power. He wrote the man's name, thinking about his face, and followed it with "blood loss." Now he had a few minutes to think up details. He decided he would try to also test his creativity and kill two birds with one stone. Worst-case scenario, that unattached sheet would have lost its power and he'd kill that man later. A fleeting, horrifying thought crossed his mind that maybe the Death Note would be useless after he ripped off the cover and the instructions sheet, but it was quickly overridden by his Practical side: he'd already ripped it off and it wouldn't affect his tests. If they ended up not working, well…

He started writing. The man would try to make a dangerous maneuver which wouldn't work and his car would hit a tree. Then he'd leave it and try to run, heedless of oncoming traffic. The cops chasing him would miss every shot except for one, which would hit his femoral artery just as he crossed to the other side of the highway. There, a biker would hit him and that would break a few of his bones and he'd fall. But he was already bleeding out, and he'd eventually die before medical attention could get to him. That took three minutes to write. Light wondered if he should add any more details, but decided that was good enough. He waited and watched.

On TV, suddenly the car being chased attempted a bootleg turn and failed miserably.

It's showtime.

The car turned only 120 degrees and hit a tree just off the highway, having its right front door crushed and halting. Hanson quickly scrambled off and ran as the police officers started shooting in his direction. While he did that, somehow, miraculously, one of the bullets hit his right leg. That made him trip and fall right in front of a biker who ran over him and fell off his bike. The criminal was lying on the floor, bleeding, and screaming for help. The police cars surrounded him, but eventually he bled out.

Success.

 _So the pages work independently. It's a property of them, not of the notebook itself. The notebook is made of death pages, in other words, it's not the pages that are bound to a death notebook_ , Death said poetically, and snickered.

 _There was also a good deal of fine control over the scene, and yet somehow the notebook managed to make it all happen. This isn't just some toy, this has the power of a god_ , Practical replied.

Light's stomach churned again as his mind debated. One part of him screamed that this was wrong. The others observed that the man had murdered two people in cold blood and was running away in high speed, endangering many other civilians. The Death Note was also quite precise: the biker who hit the criminal didn't even get too injured; only the criminal died, and no one else.

He was worryingly becoming thirsty for more.

 _We controlled that man's actions quite finely indeed_ , Practical continued.

 _I wonder exactly how much control we can exert._

* * *

5:26PM. Test number 2.

Maurice Skäld was being tried for mugging a couple, locking them in their own car and setting the car on fire. He was pleading guilty. That was all Light needed. He had a hard time finding the criminal's face online, but eventually he did, and wrote down his name. The cause of death would be simply a heart attack, so he wrote that. After he wrote it, he could be free with his creativity again. The man was going to find the nearest justice officer, start cawing like a chicken, scream that he was turning into a cat, and then die.

 _Why, exactly, are we doing this?_ Common Sense asked.

 _We want to know how much control we can have, right?_ Practical explained. _So we need to find out exactly how much people can do before they die because of this Death Note._

* * *

5:30PM. Test number 3.

An Indian man threw acid on his daughter's face for refusing to marry the man he'd arranged for her. Light decided he'd fall to his death from the top of the Eiffel Tower in twenty minutes.

* * *

5:33PM. Test number 4.

A Chinese woman locked her children up in a basement when they disobeyed her. One of her children died because of that. She was under arrest, so she'd stab herself with the nearest pointy object and draw a pentagram (which Light drew on the page) on a wall with her blood. She'd die of blood loss.

* * *

5:37PM. Test number 5.

A Nigerian serial rapist, currently under arrest, would die of a heart attack after drawing M. C. Escher's Belvedere using chalk.

* * *

5:45PM. Test number 6.

A French man who killed two people right after mugging them would die at 2AM the next day. Light didn't specify cause of death for this one.

* * *

5:50PM. Test number 7.

A Brazilian mob boss, currently arrested but suspected of controlling the organized crime from behind bars, would die of a heart attack at 2AM, too.

* * *

5:54PM.

 _Are you satisfied with your testing?_ asked Common Sense.

 _Yes, quite_ , replied Death giddily.

* * *

4:20PM. November 29, 2003.

When Light arrived home the next day, he looked up those people whose names he'd written on the death note. Tests 2, 4 and 7 worked as he'd written them; tests 3 and 5 died of simple heart attacks; test 6 died 40 seconds after he'd written his name on the previous day.

 _What can we conclude from the data?_ Practical asked.

 _We have a good deal of control over the deaths_ , Death said. _We can control not only the circumstances of the death, but also the actions of people surrounding the death so that it happens exactly as we want it to. However, it has to be within a reasonable limit of realism. Anything outright impossible such as climbing the Eiffel Tower or drawing something you've never seen is forbidden. We do also need to specify cause of death before setting time of death or other circumstances, it'd appear. Other than that, though… it seems we can do pretty much anything. We could control anyone evil we wanted! We could—_

 _Now, hold on a minute, there_ , Moral said. We're supposed to only kill those who deserve to die, and not do anything else. We mustn't make anyone suffer or toy with them.

Yes, Practical agreed. Light had a distinct impression of someone nodding inside his head, and that really made him question his own sanity and how independent these parts of himself were. _Besides, we're being too careless. We need a way of killing those people that won't show who or where we are. I'm sure no one will really look at these weird deaths these past two days, but on the off-chance that they do, we need to start being much more careful._

* * *

 _9:22AM. December 19, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"Of these four heart attacks," the investigator continued after explaining the detected heart attacks, "three happened after four P.M. on a weekday, just like Otoharada on the previous day. One of them happened on the next day, during the morning, and on that same day the first of the hourly murders was detected, starting at five P.M. That is all."

"I see," Yagami said. "Thank you for your report."

"Yagami-sama," said Watari, and the chief looked at him. "L would like to be sent a copy of the three notes left by the dying men."

"I would, too," Klein said.

"These notes are on file," the investigator who delivered the report said. "And in the report. They can be sent electronically immediately."

"Splendid," Klein interjected, and now she looked less scared, her face having acquired more color and her voice firm as before.

 _"He walked down the_

 _eerie, scary, strange,_

 _lonely, silent, empty,_

 _lovely, beautiful, shiny,_

 _ominous, dark, foreboding_

 _lane of the road of death."_

 _"Who are you?_

 _asked the little boy._

 _No one, really,_

 _the dark, tall man replied._

 _Then, all of a sudden,_

 _out of the blue, really, the crow appeared."_

 _"Please, don't hurt me._

 _Lovely boy, why would I hurt you?_

 _Ah, lovely boy, no,_

 _you are special, you are._

 _And we'll have so much fun together!"_

* * *

 _9:30AM._

 _This is sick_ , Yagami thought as he read the three notes. _Why would they write these notes?_

"Chief," Watari called and Yagami looked up from the notes he'd been examining. Everyone in the headquarters was busy cross-referencing, trying to find patterns, the usual stuff. Klein had an abstracted look on her face, lost in deep thought, probably trying to extract some meaning from the cryptic message. "Have you found anything?"

"No," he replied. "Except…" Some of the investigators stopped what they were doing to hear Yagami speak. "These seem to form a coherent whole. But the sources… they couldn't have contacted each other. They lived in very different parts of the world. And they don't seem to be saying anything at all!" He put his face on his hands, exhausted.

 _Unless…_

"Yagami-sama," Watari called, and the chief looked at him. "L believes the message in these notes isn't in the text itself."

"What, you mean like a riddle?" Yagami replied. "We already have men working on that."

"No. L believes Kira may be able to control his victims before they die." Everyone's shoulders slumped when they heard that. People had been working under that unspoken assumption, of course, but to have it out in the open, spoken aloud, that was different. The glum mood was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and the faint buzzing of whispers intensified a little bit. "These messages weren't sent by the victims. They were sent by Kira himself."

"Yes, I thought so, too," said the chief while everyone else seemed to go back to their work. "Still—"

"Chief, there was another note!" one of the members of the watch team said. "Look."

 _"Going forth, going back,_

 _always going, never stopping!_

 _Moving on, moving off,_

 _eternally walking!"_

* * *

 _9:34AM._

Yagami read the new note. He then gathered all notes and read them over again, trying to find the connection. The fourth one simply didn't seem to fit.

"We got something," one of the members of the cryptanalysis team said.

"Let's hear it," Yagami replied.

"Just, the first letter of each line," the investigator sounded almost apologetic. Sure, they'd been analyzing those messages for only twenty minutes, but it was still pretty obvious and should've been noticed before.

 _That one's staying on the team_ , L thought about the investigator as he watched the scene through the webcam.

"H-e-l-l-o-l-W-a-N-t-T-o-P-L-A-y-A-G-a-M-e. 'Hello, L. Want to play a game?'" He raised his head from the papers to look at Watari. The cloaked man only looked at the chief for a few seconds then started typing, seemingly ignoring what had just happened.

* * *

 _4:42PM. December 18, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"I'm just messing with them," Light explained to Ryuk. "First you create a message, then you find a way to convey that message, and then you watch as they start to find an infinity of hidden meanings in it." He smiled and raised his index finger. "There are no meanings. This is an empty threat."

"I see…" Ryuk said. "But why are you messing with them? Why do that at all?"

"Well, if they're smart they're trying to profile me based on my patterns. Which is part of the reason why I'm trying to leave none. Most serial killers are male, so they probably think that's true of me. They're also generally uneducated, methodical, bored of life and sexually deviant. Now, I'm not really methodical for method's sake." He shook his head. "My M.O. wasn't picked out of any deep sense or unseated desire. I just want to make it as hard as possible to be caught, ideally altogether impossible."

"And… that explains your message how…?" The shinigami was upside down again, eating his apple.

"I'm just trying to mess with their psychological profiling. Maybe they'll start thinking that I have a very competitive nature and that I think of this as a game against L and the police. Whatever conclusion they draw, it won't be the simple 'Kira is messing with us' one, and so I'll invariably make their model of me less accurate. I'm giving them evidence that has negative correlation with the actual reason I sent them that evidence, thus making myself harder to find. Basically, I just created noise." His lips curled up. "But it's also really a threat. I want them to know I can control the people I kill before they die. I want them to be afraid. Fearful people are more careless. I might even try to pick dad's mind when he comes back from work."

* * *

 _8:57PM. December 19, 2003. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

With all the information thus far collected, it was finally time to think. He couldn't postpone proposing solutions any longer.

So L thought.

* * *

 _9:00AM. December 20, 2003. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Watari walked into the room, sat at his usual desk, turned on his laptop, and started streaming the image to L, who waited anxiously. When the anonymous investigator saw the image showing up on his screen, he was a bit disheartened. He had imagined some people would have left because of the news that Kira could control his victims but as far as he could see not a lot of them had.

 _No, that's a good thing. It means they're stronger than you previously thought. Maybe they're not so completely hopeless as you expected them to be_ , he thought.

 _How often have our intuitive models of people been wrong in the past?_ another part of him asked.

"Report?" Yagami asked as he walked in, and the report started. There was no news, no more notes, just the usual 20-something reported deaths, plus some gaps from the past few days being covered by previously unrecognized deaths. Once it was over, the regular movement resumed. From L's vantage point, that was the main problem. There were a lot of people there, yes—L estimated between 100 and 150 officers from all countries involved with the Interpol—but there was too much idle going, too many people who were being sub-optimally used.

"Watari, turn on voice relay." Watari did as instructed, turned his laptop around and showed everyone who happened to be looking in that direction a white background with the letter L in Cloister Black. The webcam rotated so that it was facing the right way again, and the electronically distorted voice could be heard in the headquarters. "Officers of the Kira investigation case," L started in English, "we will need a shift in our investigation in light of yesterday's details. Chief, I will need you to help these people organize into a few groups."

* * *

 _6:08PM. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"I'm home!" the tired voice of Yagami Soichiro could be heard. The chief removed his shoes and walked in. The mouth-watering smell of food was the first pleasant sensory input he'd had since he'd left his house the previous morning - he'd spent two days at the office - and he could quite literally hear his stomach grumbling. He walked to the kitchen to find Sachiko and Sayu already there.

"Light, your father's home!" Soichiro's wife called out, beaming.

"I'm coming!" The chief sat and waited patiently for her to serve them all. Just as she was about to shout again, Light walked through the kitchen's door. "Hello dad," he greeted his father from a distance and sat on the table. He'd never been very fond of displays of affection.

"Hi" was the tired reply Light got.

"How are you?"

"Tired," answered the officer simply. They started eating in silence. Even Sayu looked a bit subdued by Soichiro's apparent sullen mood. Light wondered whether his notes had caused that, and dared ask after a while.

"You don't look so good. Is the Kira case going slow?" Tentative, innocent, curious, childish. He managed to impart all those adjectives into his words.

"Oh, no… That bastard's messing with us, but he's being sloppy and L is a very good investigator." He sighed. "And so… we're a bit overworked now." He shook his head and frowned, sounding a bit frustrated. "Sorry. I can't talk about it. It's very stressing not to, but it's confidential. I shouldn't even have mentioned L."

What was the single-word-sentence that crossed Light's mind when he heard that.

* * *

 _6:49PM._

 _What?! Sloppy?!_

As soon as they finished eating, Light excused himself, mentioning studying, and went to his bedroom in an internal panic. Ryuk, as always, followed the boy on his heels, chuckling as he always did. "Kukuku…"

 _Let's calm down, we can't actually think if we're in this panic_ , suggested Practical.

 _He's right. We need to objectively assess how sloppy we've actually been and then figure out what to do in order to control the damage_ , agreed Common Sense.

Death grudgingly accepted, and Light started taking long, even breaths.

 _What have we actually done that was very Sloppy?_ Practical started.

 _We killed Taylor_ , Cautious piped up. _There was also that guy from TV, Otoharada whatshisface…_

 _We need to work under the assumption that L knows we're Japanese_ , Common Sense said. _What else could he know?_

* * *

 _8:58PM. December 19, 2003. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L thought, thought and thought. It was, in fact, his favorite sport. He needed to gauge his uncertainties, and it was about time, too.

 _I should be working under the assumption that Kira is Japanese_ , he started. He knew humans tended to be severely overconfident. He also knew about overcorrection, though, and so when it came to putting numbers into his uncertainty he'd actually spent the past few years honing his intuition. _Otoharada Kurou died during a Live TV news report on a Japanese news channel. Any information about him before that was very hard to find, even with our monitoring ability. Kira also killed Taylor first, which was just our verification procedure. Yes, I'd say we're 95% certain Kira is Japanese_ , analysed Intuition. _Or he's playing on a level so meta we'd have to rework our strategies completely. I don't think we have evidence to suggest that, however._

 _Most statistics say that the probability that a given serial killer is male ranges between 92% and 95%, and our personal experience agrees with that data. Do we have any evidence that would change that?_ Questioner asked.

 _I don't think we can actually gauge the killer's gender. We should go with maximum entropy and just assume that the statistical data is reliable. But let's be conservative. The probability that he's male is 92%._ That was yet another voice, the one he called Thinker.

 _What about his age?_ asked Questioner.

 _According to most statistics, there's a 28% probability that he's between 26 and 31 and a 57% probability that he's between 18 and 36_ , Thinker answered.

 _But I feel we do have evidence that he's younger than the average serial killer, Intuition proposed. For one, he's highly idealistic. He wants to purge all evil from the world, apparently. He's very careful to kill people who were purposeful in their actions. Also, there's the time of day his schedule resets, which suggests…_

 _It suggests nothing yet, we're not ready to integrate that information into our model_ , interrupted Thinker. _However, I do agree that he's probably younger than our average serial killer. We'll probably have to include teenagers now._

 _Not too young, though_ , continued Intuition, _otherwise they wouldn't have the necessary cognitive skills to have this much control over the deaths, not to mention emotional control._

 _He's much smarter than your average serial killer, too. Since he's Japanese, he's very likely educated._

 _You're purposefully missing our main piece of evidence…_ Questioner pointed out.

 _Indeed_ , Thinker conceded. _But we're getting to it just now. Let's review everything we do have. His first killing was Otoharada Kurou, his subsequent killings before the spree started all happened after 4PM. Furthermore, the analysis of the data suggests that Kira sets his murder schedule daily after that time, too. Taylor himself only died on the day following the announcement at 5PM, so he probably had already set the schedule for the day of the announcement itself and couldn't change it. Using this and regressing to the mean of serial killers…_

 _Alright_ , Questioner gathered, _with all of this I guess we can finally ask. He's a young idealistic intelligent educated Japanese male who has availability to kill after 4PM. Who's he?_

* * *

 _7:21PM. December 20, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

 _Fuck_ was the single word Light thought after he'd worked out exactly how sloppy he'd been.

* * *

 _9:09AM. Kira Task Force Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"I want 5% of you working on cryptanalysis to decode any messages Kira might send; 15% should keep looking for patterns in the deaths that might give us renewed information about the profile. These 20% are the ones that will tell us the shape of the remaining 80%. Yagami-sama, the remaining 80% are the ones that are actually going to start investigating people and will be headed by yourself. After the groups have been decided, these 80% should come talk to me again so that we can continue our plans. We have been too long gathering information; it's time to move a little bit. We have what we need. We're going to catch this criminal. It's time to act."

Almost everyone spent two seconds in stunned silence. L very rarely spoke directly to them—he knew there were patterns that could be used to identify traits of the speaker if you heard them talk directly—so hearing a whole speech like that left them dumbfounded. But those were the more invested of the officers (or some of them were anyway), so as soon as they recovered, Yagami was shouting orders and calling people and asking for opinions.

The whole process took two hours, and then the three groups were ready. When they were, Yagami sat back on his desk and looked at Watari, who had since turned the laptop back to himself and was using it. The mysterious cloaked man noticed and turned the laptop again. "Yagami-sama, you will further divide this third group. We will assume Kira is Japanese, so waste no police time on non-Japanese until and unless we have evidence that points otherwise. Klein-san, please take it from here."

The woman, who had been silent since they convened, spoke up. "I believe there is a 90% chance that this killer is a male, and this is a conservative estimate. He's probably young, between 15 and 30 years old." There were murmurs at that. "Yes, I have started considering that he may be a teenager. This sort of idealism and enthusiasm is atypical of older people. However, the shift isn't too significant. Finally, he must be in some kind of schedule that makes it likely that he's unobserved—ideally at home—after 4P.M. on weekdays. So what's our target group?"

Yagami realized at the same time one of the investigators opened her eyes wide and said, "A student?"

"Precisely," Klein said. "Our killer is most likely a male student, high-achieving and intelligent. Now, we can't put everyone on that, because there are still too many loose variables."

"So of this group, 75% will be in charge of investigating people between 15 and 30 years old, preferably students—that includes High School and University—preferably male. We need to start somewhere, so we'll start with the best students in Japan. The other 25% will concentrate on other groups, as you see fit. Feel free to consult Klein about her profile," said the distorted voice that was L.

"But, um, L-sama," one tiny-looking investigator asked. Everyone looked at her, and she seemed to shrink into herself. L had noticed her before, however. She was one of the quick ones, and even though she didn't speak much, she always seemed to not fall into the so common shock that every piece of news in this case seemed to cause in everyone else. "There are more than 127 million Japanese people. How many of those are students?"

"Over 4 million," Klein answered immediately. The small investigator looked as if someone had hit her.

"Where should we start looking?"

Klein was about to answer when L said, "You have already figured that out."

"…yes," she said timidly, after a while. She looked like she might just explode.

Yagami looked bewildered between the both of them, until he finally asked, "Well?"

When neither L nor Klein answered, the timid investigator said, "We should start with the top students of the most densely populated region in Japan." Yagami twitched almost imperceptibly at that, but L caught it and made a mental note to investigate.

"Right," L continued. "And that is, by far, Kanto. Which just happens to be around us. Yagami-sama, it would be best if the teams separated physically according to their function so that investigators that are part of the same team could have quick access to each other. We should maybe find more headquarters."

"…I'll look into it," answered Yagami Soichiro. Then L went silent, and Watari turned his computer to himself again.

* * *

 _7:23PM. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

 _Right_ , Practical immediately started. Or… well, immediately after the sheer surprise of Light's glaring stupidity was fought and destroyed. _We've been very sloppy. We should assume the worst: the police knows for a fact that Kira is a young student, high school or maybe college, and a very smart one at that._

 _Don't you think we may be flattering ourselves by thinking we're smart?_ asked Common Sense. _I mean, if we let on this much, I'm not sure we actually deserve that adjective…_

There was a wordless grunt from Death, and Cautious seemed to be emanating a sort of I-told-you-so aura.

 _Be as it may, we have revealed way too much, even taking into account the message we "sent" to make noise. Being pessimistic, they probably know we're a high school male student, probably high achieving_ , Practical continued. _We need to make more noise and be more careful._

 _What could we be doing differently?_ asked Common Sense again. _We need to review everything._

Ryuk watched Light's many facial expression changes from the bed, content with his apple. He didn't seem to mind waiting until the boy explained what was going on in his head, and indeed patience paid off.

"I have noticed a curious thing about the Death Note," Light told Ryuk as he opened his nondescript white notebook. Ryuk floated over to look at it. Light opened it and pointed to the left margin of the note. "I have removed a few pages from the notebook. Actually a lot of them. At first, it shows. But after a while," and he showed the place where there should be some remnant of the removed page. It looked as if only one page had been removed since he'd started using it.

"Ah- yes, the Death Note is infinite," Ryuk said. "You can just keep filling it and it will never end." Never end? _Now there's an unexpected blessing_ , Light thought. He'd been trying to think of plans on how to obtain a new notebook once his ran out, but apparently that wouldn't happen. How lucky.

 _Alright. So, about the Death Note itself, is there anything we should be doing differently?_ Practical mused. They looked at the page and all that could be seen was that someone had worked really hard to make something impossible to read. _It had worked, certainly. We remove the pages once they're filled…_

"Ryuk, what would happen if I wrote someone's death and immediately ripped the page off and burned it?"

"Once a name is written on a death note that person will die. No matter what happens to the death note, to the person who wrote the name or to the shinigami who owns it, that death will happen."

Light smiled the smile that creeped Ryuk out. _Such a creepy child…_

 _So we can improve that: remove pages as soon as we're done writing the day's deaths. It's unnecessary to save space since the death note is infinite. What else?_ continued Practical.

 _We're not… actually being smart about our computer. There are too many ways this could go wrong. We should stop using a permanent-state OS to do our research._

Practical concurred. _Agreed. And… let's be quite honest here. Our password-protected idea is good, but there's no reason whatsoever to keep those files in our computer. We'll get that encrypted flash drive and make it so the list is destroyed if someone gets the password wrong._

 _Ah, but that has its own failure modes. If someone does get their hands on our flash drive and destroys all the information there and all the deaths suddenly stop, well… that could be bad. No, I mean, that **will** be bad_ , this time it was Cautious who spoke, for the first time in a while. It was good to know his internal voices were starting to agree.

 _Right. Then, maybe two different drives with two different passwords and kept in two different places…?_ Practical suggested.

 _There's no reason to limit ourselves. It's better to err on the side of caution. I suggest three_ , replied Cautious.

 _But will we keep a copy of the document on each of the drives or will we have three different documents with different people?_ asked Common Sense. They thought of losing targets because of the loss of one of the flash drives. _No, that could not do._

 _Besides_ , continued Practical, _if they found even one of those documents we'd be doomed anyway. We wouldn't probably be any less doomed if we separated the documents._

 _Well, maybe we would, in fact_ , argued Common Sense, _but I'm pretty sure the gain is negligible._

 _No permanent-state OS, information kept on three different, physically separated, encrypted and password-protected drives. What else?_ urged Death.

 _No longer react to taunts. No longer taunt them at all. No longer try to communicate with them. No longer give any evidence of who we are_ , Cautious replied.

 _But now they have enough evidence to actually start investigating us_ , Death said.

 _That's true_ , began Common Sense, _but we can't do much about that, not for now anyway. Damn it, there has to be a way to infiltrate their headquarters and find out what they're doing…_

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	4. Chapter 4

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scienstist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 4.

* * *

 _A/N: To those who are worried, this is not going to be a rewrite of the original story with a smarter L and Light. But this is only the fourth chapter, the consequences of their differing actions are only starting to show up now._

* * *

 _9:00AM. December 22, 2003. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"Good morning, Team Gamma," L's voice was heard through the laptop speakers. The conversations stopped and the team looked at Watari. They had spent most of the previous day organizing and arranging their new headquarters. Team Gamma, the largest one, kept the old quarters, and the other two were moved to smaller rooms. The layout had changed a little bit, however. Now, there were two desks in evidence, one dedicated to Watari, who no longer sat at the back. "It is time to start our investigations. We will no longer be reading the daily report of Kira's murders; if any new information is obtained, the other two teams will inform us. Now it is time to act. We need to discuss what we know and figure out the best strategy. Klein-san."

The woman stood up. "Based on our profile, it is likely that our killer is a bright young male student. That is our best guess, and we have to start somewhere. 30% of the team should focus on bright High School students, 60% on bright University students, and the remaining 10% will investigate anyone who has brought any attention to themselves because of intellectual prowess in the past five years. Give more attention to the male suspects, but do not ignore the female ones."

"Are we sure this person is intellectually high-achieving?" asked an investigator, the tiny-looking one L had noticed before. She had short mousy hair and black eyes, and everything about her looked incredibly fragile and delicate. She was the kind of person you instinctively felt like protecting, like she could break if the world threw anything at her.

"As Klein-san said, we have to start somewhere," answered L's voice. "The attitude of the killer seems highly self-confident and the fact that he sent us a message implies that he may even be cocky. Coupling that with his strategy of randomness, which is simple but not obvious without hindsight, we should be looking at someone who doesn't think they'll be caught and who trusts their own intellect highly. I do not believe the killer will give us any more significant bits of evidence without our actions, and since we're still collecting data even as we investigate and we don't need too many people to analyze that data, this is the best allocation of resources we could have."

"We are going to start compiling a database," Yagami continued, "within the constraints given by L. We are going to start with a brute-force search: investigate each person from the list, starting at the top, for suspicious activity. We cannot spend too much time on everyone, just enough to have a more limited set for further investigation."

"I am recruiting more international help," L said after it was clear Yagami was done, "including from agencies such as the FBI. They will be contacting you shortly to coordinate and optimize. Let's get started."

Later that day, Yagami looked at a list with the first 300 names of the best High School students in Kanto. Watari, under L's instructions, surreptitiously turned the webcam to the Chief, so L saw the look of dismay that crossed the old man's face.

* * *

 _4:13PM. December 25, 2003. The streets of Tokyo, Japan._

"Light," Ryuk said suddenly.

"I told you not to talk to me in public," Light answered under his breath without looking at the floating clown.

"I know. But there's something I need to tell you about that." Light didn't show any reaction, so Ryuk kept talking. "You know I'm not on your or L's side. I'm sticking with you because it's the rules, and also because you're very interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a human quite like you, and in some ways you're a better shinigami than all I've met." Light suppressed a smile. Tell me something I don't know, he thought. "So to preserve my source of fun it'd be better if you didn't die too soon." Now he hid a frown. What? "Which is why I'm telling you that someone's following you. They've been at it for two days."

 _They know. They know, they know, they know_ , Death started moaning.

 _Shut up. They don't. There is simply no way we left enough evidence for them to pin us down_ , Common Sense reasoned.

 _Then how do you explain this?!_ yelled Death.

 _Motion to have Death removed_ , suggested Cautious. _He's too dumb to be a part of us._ The others were a bit uneasy but ignored Cautious' advice. _They're brute-forcing_ , he concluded. _Last week we reasoned that in the worst case scenario they know we're a good High School student. There are at least a few hundred thousand of those in Japan, probably a few million. What would you expect? They're probably going through a list of Japan's top students, and we're at the top of that list._

 _One has to remember that being a good student doesn't automatically imply being a smart student. We just happen to be both, but we have talked to the other good students and… well…_ Common Sense explained. _Anyway, being smart makes it more likely that you're a good student ceteris paribus, so being a good student is evidence that you're smart. They probably have nowhere to start, so they're starting with grades and other types of academic achievement._

That seemed to calm Death down considerably, but Practical started thinking at top speed. _What do we do? What's our plan?_

 _I predict this person will stop following us soon. We're leaving no evidence of our alternate identity. All we have to do is behave normally and this person will move on_ , Common Sense explained.

 _Are you sure of that? We have made too many mistakes already. We can't afford to make more_ , worried Practical.

 _Well… if Ryuk had told us about this person earlier, we could've been more cautious…_ Common Sense started.

 _No. We're not being cautious enough as it is_ , Cautious warned. _We are leaving evidence. Like it or not, we are very methodical, we're always home by 4:30PM, we barely ever go out with anyone—_

 _We're soon taking the university entrance exams_ , Common Sense carefully explained. _It's only natural that we spend a lot of time home now. We are the top student of this country, after all, and if we didn't study it'd be even more suspicious…_ he drifted.

 _How sure are you of your observations? Also, that is beyond the point. They are working under the hypothesis that we update our schedule every day between 4 and 5PM. If we manage to show that our schedule was still updated at that time but we weren't home, that is significant evidence against the hypothesis. We need to provide them with that evidence tomorrow_ , Cautious said. The others, after some more debating, agreed. _Tomorrow is a Friday. So, here's what we're going to do…_

* * *

 _4:05PM. December 26, 2003. Somewhere in Tokyo, Japan._

Subject seems to be deviating from his pattern, the tiny investigator wrote on a tiny notepad. She had been only collecting data and trying to hold judgment, as L had instructed, so she didn't pay attention to the ideas forming in the back of her mind. Subject is surrounded by friends, seems to be socializing. They are not heading towards subject's house. She followed them, trying to stay inconspicuous.

The group went to a karaoke bar, and the investigator waited ten minutes outside before going in. The group had picked a large table—they were 9 people in total—and no one had mustered up the courage to sing yet. She kept taking notes, and no one seemed to notice her. After a while, Light and a girl who was blushing furiously got up and they sang together, being soon followed by the rest of the group.

They left the bar at around 8:45PM and went each to their respective houses. Light accompanied one of the girls—the same who'd sung the first song with him—to her house, and then returned to his. The investigator wrote down the exact time Light arrived home as 9:07PM. She kept outside until all the lights of the Yagami household had been off for two hours and then returned to the HQ.

* * *

 _9:01AM. December 27, 2003. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"I would like to receive the first batch of reports on the investigated," said Yagami to his group of investigators when they were all settled. They had each spent four days tailing the top 130 suspects. The remaining 32 investigators were continuing to compile the database and integrating the data collected into it.

Yagami received the files with the data thus far collected and quickly scanned the list. His eyes stopped at his son's name, besides which he could find the category "Low to moderate suspicion." He double clicked it and looked at all the notes taken by the investigator in charge.

They described Light's day-to-day routine with a few details that frightened the chief in their precision. Most of the social interest seems feigned. Constantly bored. Methodical in his schedule. At the end were the investigator's impressions. As L had instructed, after collecting the data and not thinking of conclusions, the investigators were supposed to finally say something.

Subject fits the psychological profile of the killer. His strict and detached manner suggest constant high-level reasoning. Research into subject's academic achievements and student life show great range of abilities even when compared to academically similar peers. Nevertheless, a student who spends as much time as subject does studying is less likely to be Kira. Additionally, last day of investigations concluded with strong evidence against being Kira: subject spent a good deal of the night with friends, without access to any means of communication nor apparent tool for murder, and during that time the murders continued as usual, including two of people whose crimes had been announced on that same day. Barring improbable scenarios where subject needs access to no tools whatsoever to realize the murders, the only competitor to the innocence hypothesis is crafty cleverness and having detected the ongoing investigation. The apparently anomalous social gathering with friends at the end of the investigation is medium evidence in favor of such detection; the training and caution of this investigator is weak evidence against it. Subject showed no change in behavior that suggested that, which is further weak evidence against the hypothesis. However, it is the personal opinion of this investigator that this is well within the intellectual capabilities of the subject. Such musings notwithstanding, the prior was very low and the evidence not good enough to raise the posterior to significance. This investigator suggests that priority is to be given to the subject only in the event of the elimination of most other possible suspects.

Yagami read the whole thing twice, frowning with concentration. The rest of the report seemed to be spotless and airtight. He sighed in resignation. Everything the investigator had said was, after all, true, and he knew his son's intellectual abilities enough to agree. But those weren't everything. Light would never do that. He was the son of a police officer, brought up to uphold the law and respect human life. He would never descend to such depths.

Would he?

* * *

 _6:02PM. December 25, 2003. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

"What are you planning to do, Light?" asked the shinigami, who seemed to take joy in watching the wheels turning inside the boy's head.

"I'm going to fool this investigator into thinking I'm not Kira. Isn't that obvious?"

"How?" Ryuk was already used to the occasional contempt Light seemed to show him. It was pretty much how Light treated most people.

"Well, I'm… I'd like to have your help, actually."

"Light, I told you, I'm neutral—"

"Neutral, yes, I know," interrupted the boy. "Which is why you're going to help me. See, the way things are right now, the game isn't really balanced. L has access to the Interpol and agents from all over the world, the best computer surveillance and who knows what else. Me? I'm just a High School student. And I'm not going to ask you much. I just want you to stick by the investigator tomorrow, from the moment I leave school to the moment they stop tailing me, and read their notes. Also, I'm going to bring you three extra apples per day for the next three weeks if you help me," he added his trump card nonchalantly.

"Three… every day?!" Light had the distinct impression that Ryuk's mouth was watering even though he was pretty sure Ryuk didn't have saliva in his mouth. "Okay. I'll do it. But you know, there's something else I can do for you…"

"Oh?" He sat up straighter. New resources were always a good thing.

"Shinigami can see the names and lifespans of humans just by looking at them. We know exactly the date and time of death of anyone we want, because when we kill humans, we add their otherwise remaining lifespan to ours, so it's good to know how much we're adding. And we can make a pact with the human that currently holds a death note." Pact. Not good, Light thought. "You can trade half your remaining lifespan for the eyes of the Shinigami: the ability to see exactly what we see."

Light thought about that for three seconds and asked, "If I do that, will I get the lifespan of the people I kill?"

"No, only Shinigami get that—"

"Then not a chance," Light interrupted.

"Are you—"

"Yes. If I ever feel like a failure has a greater disutility than losing half my life and I can prevent it with your aid I'll get it, but right now that is definitely not the case. No, I'm confident in my plan."

"What is it?"

"It's simple. It won't guarantee a success, but it'll definitely throw them off my scent. I'm going to use the school's computers twice tomorrow - since the investigator can't get into the school, they won't know it, and I'll use two different students' credentials to log into the system pretending I forgot mine - and I'll get information about two murders that I'll execute while I'm with a group of friends somewhere. I have an advantage here in that they don't know how I kill people. Even if they assume it's supernatural in origin, which they likely do, something as simple as writing a name on a piece of paper ought to be forbidden - that's how human beings think, even smart ones. It's what I would think if I were in L's shoes. I think. Anyway, it's all I can do right now. You could've warned me earlier."

"Eh. Sorry, Light." If he'd known Light would offer so many apples he certainly would have warned the boy earlier.

* * *

 _11:11AM. December 27, 2003. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"The FBI has arrived in Japan," Watari announced suddenly. "They have sent 35 agents. We have word from other agencies around the world. They will be here shortly. We should have at least 300 more people arriving by the end of the week. Some of them will help the other two teams, but the majority will help you brute-force our database. There are a few million people to go through. This is not going to be an easy or fast project, but it's by no means impossible. We already have a list of potential suspects based on your work so far."

* * *

 _11:12AM. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L watched everything, as usual, through his computer, and sighed. They still had much, much work to do. And many people would die in the meantime. Thousands of them.

And was it really that bad? He kept questioning and second-guessing himself, and that wasn't usual. Even for the sake of solving the puzzle and catching him, was Kira truly evil? Not to use this overused word that didn't even reflect a real concept, but what were the consequences of it? If you killed people who didn't repent, vicious criminals. People who aren't good for society, not for anyone but themselves.

He smacked himself on the forehead. No, that sort of thinking was stupid. First, it was ironic, wasn't it, murdering murderers? What made you different? What makes you different, Kira? How do you motivate yourself?

Fundamentally, L thought, Kira was vain. Arrogant. He truly, really thought he knew what was best. That kind of invincibility, of childish thinking, that was characteristic of someone who believed himself right and righteous. Maybe not in those terms, but Kira did believe his brain. That, hopefully, would be his downfall.

Kira was human. That much was obvious. And even if he was a smart human, he was still corruptible - and apparently corrupted. He would slip again. Someone who really trusted his own architecture so much, who really believed his merely human brain was capable of actually measuring the worth of someone's life, that person wasn't a person who could win. For the good of the tribe you shouldn't take power even for the good of the tribe. For the good of the tribe you shouldn't kill someone even for the good of the tribe.

 _I will catch you, Kira. You will slip up again. They always do._

* * *

 _9:02PM. Just outside the Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"Watari," Yagami greeted the cloaked man as he left the HQ.

"Yagami-sama," acknowledged the mysterious figure. "L would like to speak."

"Of course." The chief didn't invite him to follow, he just walked to the lift and was followed. Once he arrived at his old office, he sat, and gestured for Watari to do the same. "Yes?"

"Is anything bothering you, Yagami-sama?" the electronic voice came from Watari's cloak.

Interesting, Yagami noted. So he doesn't need his laptop to be present. "We're hunting an international serial killer. How could it not be bothering me?"

"I mean more specifically," explained L. "You seem troubled by the idea that a High School student could be Kira."

The chief regarded the cloaked man coolly. "You know exactly what I'm feeling, L," he said, sounding somewhat dry.

"Of course. I looked at your son's profile. He seems promising. Wants to become an investigator just like his father, I understand."

Yagami nodded, then imagined there was probably no camera on Watari and said, "Yes, indeed. He's planning on joining the force as soon as possible."

"Are social events such as yesterday's common in Light's life?"

Yagami lowered his eyes and his face got slightly red. "I… do not know for certain," he replied, turning his eyes to the picture of his family he had on his desk. "I work a lot, so I do not have direct contact with most of my family's routine. I think they're not particularly common, especially this close to important exams, but they're common enough that it's not surprising. As in… he doesn't go out every weekend, but once a month, perhaps once every five weeks, sounds like as accurate as I can get."

"He accompanied one of his friends—a female—home. He didn't kiss her goodbye." That was all L said, so Yagami explained.

"He hasn't had many girlfriends—"

"But he certainly goes out with a lot of people," L concluded.

"No, not at all," Yagami said, his eyebrows raising and his tone surprised. "He has many… suitors, male and female. He's very popular in that department. But he doesn't seem to enjoy that nor take advantage of it. The only people he's dated were girls whom he really liked. I suppose that makes it even more likely that he's Kira, doesn't it?" He sighed, making it sound like a statement and not a question.

"No, actually, that's evidence against him being Kira. Serial killers in general tend to be… sexually deviant," L explained, lacking a better term. "Do you believe, not as a father, but as an investigator, that your son is a likely suspect? Indeed, if it weren't for the karaoke night out, I'd put him immediately in the 'further investigation needed' list."

"I… don't know," he answered with sincerity. "I know my son. He's a good person. He wants to be a police officer because he wants to make the world a better place. And he's also incredibly smart. I wouldn't think—as a father—that he'd be capable of that. Even if he was handed such power. As an investigator, I have to agree that he could fit the vague profile we have." They remained in silence, and Watari waited. Yagami wasn't done speaking. "My professional opinion is biased in this case. I hope you understand. I do not know what to think, because whenever I try to think professionally, I fear overcorrecting. And whenever I try to think emotionally, I certainly fall prey to the image a father has of his son. What you saw… the reactions you saw me having, they were the reactions of a father whose son is a possible suspect in a serial killer investigator. That is all."

"I see. Thank you. I appreciate your honesty," the distorted voice said. "I currently agree with investigator Silva. Your son does not warrant—as of right now—further thought. Given the huge list of potential and likely actual psychopaths we're going through, there's probably little to fear."

The chief let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. "Thank you, L. That is good for a father to hear."

"For an investigator, too. One less suspect means one less person we need to spend resources with." Watari got up and left without waiting for Yagami, correctly guessing that the chief would like some time alone with his thoughts before heading home.

* * *

 _10:37PM. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

Soichiro walked in and announced his arrival. "We're in the living room!" he heard his wife reply, and he saw the family together watching a movie.

"Hello. How was your day?" asked Light, looking up from his entertainment.

"It was very, very tiring. You'll forgive me if I don't join you? I need a shower and a night of sleep."

"No problem," replied his son, turning back to the TV. Soichiro smiled. Of course his son wasn't Kira. How could he ever have suspected that?

Ryuk watched Soichiro's facial expressions and chuckled his "Kukuku…" as the man climbed up the stairs. Light raised an eyebrow, but obviously didn't comment on the Shinigami's behavior.

* * *

 _11:53PM._

"Okay. What did you find?" Light asked Ryuk.

"Let me remind you that I do not take sides, and I'm not your servant, and…"

"Yes, I know all that," he answered with impatience. "I just want to know what they wrote." So the Shinigami recited to the boy everything investigator Silva had written, and Light's expression got grimmer and more dismayed as he listened, only lighting up a little bit by the end. "Fuck," he spits. "So if it wasn't for my… plan… they'd put me in the list for further investigation. That does not please me. That does not please me at all." Light had been sitting by his desk but now he was pacing, both hands behind his back, a deep frown on his face. "I have bought time, and that's good, but it's not enough. If they've already decided to start checking people directly, I may be running out of it."

Ryuk had stopped paying attention and was eating his prize apples quickly. That had been a good deal he'd made. Light kept pacing and talking to himself.

"They probably won't get back to me too soon, but the fact is that I am Kira and they simply will not find any evidence that anyone else is when they start being thorough. How much time do I have?" The boy looked up to see Ryuk lying on an imaginary hammock eating his apple and sighed in frustration. That good-for-nothing god of death… No, he shouldn't think like that. If it weren't for Ryuk, he'd be in an even worse situation. He needed to salvage what he could somehow.

 _You do know what we're going to have to do_ , Death said, _sounding smug instead of paranoid for a change._

 _Out of the question_ , Cautious said.

 _But… he kinda does have a point_ , Practical explained.

 _Have we all lost our minds? They're innocent people!_ Cautious sounded outraged.

 _They are lots of innocent people, too_ , Common Sense supplied. _Not only that but our father is amongst them. Plus, that'd make it pretty obvious that the person who killed them was amongst the small group investigated so far, which would give L tons of evidence to single us out._

 _But if L doesn't have a team to back him up anymore, he won't be able to investigate us at all. And if all the people investigating us die, what are the odds that anyone else will want to?_ Death still sounded smug.

 _You're—_

 _I think the word you're looking for is "right,"_ replied Death.

 _This is a false dichotomy_ , said Common Sense. _Just because we can't stand idly by and just "not generate evidence" doesn't mean the only alternative is to kill everyone who's after us._

 _Yes_ , Cautious seized. _Five minutes by the clock generating alternatives._

 _First alternative, kill everyone who's after us. Second alternative, kill a sizeable fraction of them_ , Death offered.

 _This sizeable fraction obviously must not contain the investigator who was after us_ , added Common Sense. Speaking of which… "Ryuk, you wouldn't tell me the name of the investigator who was after me, would you?"

"Eh?" Ryuk dropped from his thoughts. "Ah… sorry, Light, it's against the rules. After all, what would be the point of the Eye Trade if we could just tell the humans the names they sought?"

Light nodded at that. "How about physical description? Could you tell me that part?"

Ryuk seemed to concentrate and try to remember something, then shrugged. "Sure. She was very, very short even for a human female, brown hair, wore glasses. Eh… that was all I could get. I don't really see many differences between human faces."

"Sure. Thanks," Light said, and thought some more. _Ryuk isn't much help, but now we know whom not to kill if it comes to that, somewhat._

 _We could try to find out who L is and kill them_ , Cautious suggested.

 _That is very hard to do, but yes, it's a possible plan_ , Practical answered. _What else?_

 _Incriminate someone else?_ Common Sense said.

 _Then how would we explain that the deaths continued even after they were imprisoned?_ asked Practical.

 _We could say that the power of death passes on when someone is caught? That would make it look like Kira really is a god of death who's using humans as his tool to cleanse the world or some shit_ , he explained.

 _Positive points for style and psychological impact, penalty for complexity. What else?_

 _Is there any aspect of this problem we're not considering?_ asked Practical.

 _We're Kira. We're working under the worst-case scenario that the police know we're a bright male high school or young college student. They have started looking for specific people, and they're probably brute-forcing. But they also must have lots of influence and processing power. If we don't stop them, they'll eventually get to us_ , Death said.

 _That is, if they want to get to us_ , Cautious mused.

 _Oh._

 _See, we have quite a legion of fans, don't we?_ Cautious explained. _There are websites dedicated to us, there's even a programme dedicated to us on Sakura TV. Kira's Kindgom. How could we use that to our advantage?_

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	5. Chapter 5

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scienstist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 5.

* * *

 _A/N: Review! Reviews make me happy! There are too few reviews, I can't know what and how to improve if you don't review! Yay reviews!_

* * *

 _A/N 2: Sorry about the ultra delay, I've been busy with a lot of things, mainly school. I'm not going to promise the new chapter will come soon, but I'm not giving up this story so soon. That is, unless I suddenly receive a very large number of sensible reviews that make the very premise of my story feeble and untenable, and in that case I'd better just start it over, but my priors for that are tiny._

* * *

 _9:23AM. January 4, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Investigative teams from all over the world had arrived. However, the headquarters was still the same, and it was much emptier, because the vast majority of the team was in the field actually investigating. They had a mounting list of future investigation targets and L had decided that in two days they'd gather what they had thus far and redistribute their resources.

The past days had been uneventful. Kira kept killing, showing no sign of relenting or any change that was distinguishable from statistical noise. Because of the enlarged group, however, they already had scanned thousands of potential Kiras. About 1.2% of the people investigated figured out they were being followed, 80% of the time because of bad luck on the part of the investigator and the remaining because of sloppiness. In some cases, the investigator resigned in fear of having been found by Kira, and in all cases of incompetence where that didn't happen, the investigator was moved to another team.

There was a knock on the door. Someone opened it and one of the members of the other teams - Yagami couldn't recall whether he was Team Alpha or Team Beta - walked into their headquarters. He slowed down, taking in the empty space around him, but then continued straight to the chief.

"Mr. Yagami, we have a… situation," said the investigator in English.

"Yes?"

"With the… fansites."

"Fansites?"

"It's how we dubbed all the forms of media that glorify Kira, such as the websites dedicated to him or that show on Sakura TV. They seem to be in chaos."

"How so?" Yagami noticed the investigators in the room weren't paying any attention to this - or most of them weren't, anyway. He was glad about that. Watari was paying very close attention, however. Yagami was also glad about that.

"It seems that, uh… a number of them have been contacted simultaneously by someone claiming to be Kira."

Yagami's eyebrows shot up and even his pitch changed. "What?!"

"What did the messages say?" asked Watari.

"You see, that's the thing. Each message is different. A lot of them are conflicting and our team's specialists have mostly agreed that each message was written by a completely different person based on their structure and handwriting."

"I see," replied Yagami, regaining his calm. "What makes you think that's noteworthy? It could be just someone messing with them."

"As I said," the investigator explained, and started to sweat. His tongue unsuccessfully attempted to help his dry lips, and he threw furtive glances to the sides. "Each message seems to have been sent by a completely different person. It's one thing for someone to mimic someone else's style, maybe even two or three other people. But we currently have 36 different writing styles and counting as our analysts keep examining it. If someone is messing with them, it's a team of someones, and probably a rather large team. We have found in the past hour over 60 messages and there's probably more. Sakura TV has been conspicuously silent about this event so far, which suggests they probably received a message, too, and are waiting for Kira's Kingdom to air so they can expose it."

"That's strange. But still, if it wasn't a person messing with them, it can't have been Kira, can it? Kira is only one person, based on our profile, unless we've been severely fooled."

That made the investigator pause. He clearly hadn't thought of that. Yagami noticed that their exchange had been quite the heated one and that now many of the investigators had stopped to listen. There was an overall hush in the HQ.

"No, no, he's right," L's voice explained from its computer. "We do know Kira is using supernatural means to perform his killings and sending distinct messages simultaneously like that… Kira can also control the behavior of the victims and time of death. It's possible—indeed, likely—that he has made his victims send these messages. But that would mean that he has a much greater and finer deal of control than we'd been assuming, because unless a bunch of criminals suddenly all die at the same time, that means he can control those people long before their actual expected time of death. There's also the possibility that he can simply control people without killing them, though then we'd be hard pressed to explain how we're all still here."

Yagami digested that information and the investigator from what was probably Team Alpha waited. "Is there anything else?" he finally asked.

"In fact, there is. Even though the messages have been quite different, there is one theme that's common to a number of them."

"What's that?"

"He's, ah…" The investigator swallowed, cleared his throat, and continued. "He's commanding the people to make the investigations stop and to make public the names and faces of everyone they suspect works for the Kira case."

They were silent for a while.

"That could cause trouble," L said, finally. "Please send me, Yagami, and Klein a copy of all messages. That will be all." He went silent.

* * *

 _9:50AM._

"Yagami-sama," Watari said after spending a few minutes in silence on his laptop. He had reverted to speaking Japanese for the chief's sake.

"Yes?"

"L says we must stop the message sent to Sakura TV from airing at all costs." L felt this was a doomed endeavor, however. Watari himself could already see how this could fail. "They also believe we should check all other TV networks in case Kira has sent them something or threatened them. They do not believe Kira would actually kill anyone that's not a criminal—his 'morals' are too strong for that—but they believe Kira would make threats and bet on us believing them."

"I agree," replied Yagami under his breath. "But those messages were sent from all over the world. Isn't it likely that Kira has sent them to international broadcast stations, too? And is it possible that he would carry out his threat?"

Watari didn't answer, and Yagami correctly assumed that L was thinking. Finally, he said, "L agrees but says there's not much we can do. They will notify other agencies around the world to attempt to prevent the message from going about, but it will probably be a failure."

It was.

* * *

 _10:13AM. Sakura TV building, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami himself led a small, stealth team to Sakura TV, their main focus. They arrived and Yagami showed the receptionist his badge, with a slightly altered version of his name on it and no picture. They were also wearing helmets concealing their faces ("There's no reason to take any chances," L had reasoned).

"Oh, we were expecting you. Please, take the lift at the end of the corridor to the last floor, it's the first door to the left," she said kindly, and pointed them to the door.

The team went completely silent at that and walked to the indicated lift. No one talked, and even their steps were hushed, as if they were expecting Kira to jump from behind a potted flower and glare them to death or something. Yagami silently instructed two of the members to stay and guard the ground floor. They went up and when they arrived they found the office of the director of Sakura TV, Demegawa Higoshi. They knocked and the heavy-set, short man beamed at them. "Welcome! Can I help you?"

"Yes, ah…" Yagami cleared his throat and licked his lips. This was not what he'd been expecting. "We've been led to believe that you may have received a message…"

"Sent by Kira, yes! And who might you be?" The team thought he was being purposefully obtuse. Their uniforms made it rather clear.

"We're the police. We need to see the message." The two other investigators looked at each other. This was increasingly starting to look like a setup.

"Of course," Demegawa answered joyfully. "Just a second!" He reached into a drawer on his desk and grabbed three videotapes: one labelled 'Demegawa,' one labelled 'Police' and the third labelled 'TV.' "Kira has asked me to show you this one," he pointed to the appropriate one, "before you do anything else with the others. I'd also very much suggest that, as he has threatened to kill every person working for Sakura TV if you do not comply." Demegawa said that quite cheerfully, as if he feared no man or Kira. "If you'll let me," he said, and turned on a small monitor that was mounted behind himself, playing the second tape there.

The team stared in astonishment as the tape started. There was very little they could do. At first it was dark, but then they could see a white backdrop with a black letter K in a gothic font. A distorted voice started speaking. "Hello. If my predictions are correct, it is not yet 11AM. I would go as far as to say it's before 10:30AM." Yagami looked at his watch. 10:24AM. "But that's just me showing off my amazing powers of deduction. Now that we're over with the formalities, I'm fairly certain you lot are here because you'd be oh, oh so sad if the message I want to send to the public was broadcast. But if L is half as smart as I think they are, then you already know this is a futile effort. Let me spell this out for you." There was a very strong note of contempt detectable even through the distortion. "If the other message fails to air, everyone at Sakura TV will die. And that'd just be the start. You got the gist of my other messages, didn't you? I'm certain you did. Your investigation has to end as soon as possible. I would very much love the cooperation of the police in building my new world. Failing that, I would very much love not to have to kill anyone other than the very wicked. You have my psychological profile." Yagami gasped at that. How on earth… "Then you know that I'd very, very much rather go by my morals. And they include not killing people without whom the world is worse off." The tone suddenly became much more menacing. "But if you get in my way, then I will be forced to judge that the world is in fact better off without you, and it might just be the case that the innocent people at Sakura TV will have to be my argument to convince you. And if you think you're safe behind this thing covering your faces and with different names on your badges, think again.

"The world is changing, my dears." There was now a note of triumph in that voice. "And it's changing for the better. Do not get in my way. Do not attempt to stop me. Do not continue your investigation. I will know if you do. Oh, and one message to L specifically: I know you will keep investigating me even after this threat. And that's fine. This is just a threat, after all. I just want the world to know that I am the one who's going to call the shots, now. And you? You can keep investigating. You can keep doing whatever it is you're doing—seriously, though, what are you doing? What do you expect, me to start slipping up and giving you evidence? Come on, you know better than that. Short of investigating every single person one by one, you're not going to have much success—or you can just hand the world to me and let me finish what I started.

"The message is, then, do whatever you want, I guess." There was a distinct shrug with a very strong note of contempt in that tone. "As long as you don't stop my message from being broadcast. And then… L, I have already won."

Yagami could hear his own stomach churning. The tape ended, and he was fairly certain they wouldn't be able to find much or anything at all from analyzing it. It was very likely that Kira had taken care of that, too. Those had been some of the scariest minutes of his life.

"So, gentlemen. Kira has said that you can take all the tapes with you, as long as I have them back by 5 PM which is when Kira's Kingdom airs," explained a merry Demegawa. "I do hope you don't choose an action that will kill me. That would make me very sad." You couldn't tell by the width of his beam.

* * *

 _12:36PM. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L had watched all the videos thrice, and asked Klein to do the same. That speech had clearly been written by Kira verbatim, even if its execution hadn't been his job. Demegawa's video just showed instructions about his own role and the other videos. But there was a catch: it said that if everyone died, Demegawa himself would in fact be spared, and that he was supposed to lie to the police and tell them he'd die, too. And finally, the third video was… worrying.

And more worrying still was the fact that he actually believed Kira. If he had said it any other way, such as mentioning sacrifices or hurting innocent people, then he might have called the bluff. But the way Kira had said it - kill those without whom the world is better or worse off - that was exactly the justification the murderer would look for in order to make peace with himself when taking the life of all those people.

The teams sent to other broadcast stations came back empty-handed. Apparently Kira had only sent his message to Demegawa, or at least that was the case in Tokyo. He seemed to be very confident on his bet, or simply not care. In fact, that was more likely: Kira probably had a plan B, and C, and D, and all he needed to know was whether plan A—having Demegawa broadcast the message—would work.

They had been over all the messages sent by Kira to the various other media stations dedicated to him. Some of them said that he disliked fansites and wanted them gone, others said that he wanted them to start converting more people; some said that they should all stop making such a mess, others said that he encouraged them to make as much noise as possible; some even claimed Kira was in fact a lonely woman who would fulfill the desires of any man who could… er… "satisfy" her, but kill all those who failed. It was a big mess and L thought most of it was a sham, just noise to make everything much more confused.

But there was a repeated theme, indeed, claiming that the people who supported Kira should unite against all investigators from all over the world and make the investigations stop.

In other countries, L's contacts had found some versions of the tape sent to Sakura TV, and they all had about the same structure if not exactly the same text: one sent to the station, one to the police, one to the public. The ones to the police all threatened the execution of innocent people in case they stopped the message.

But the situation was slightly worse in the other countries. Kira had apparently guessed, correctly, that L was holding his investigations in Japan, and thus they'd be smarter about it. By consequence, he'd instructed the other directors of TV stations to keep hidden cameras on filming the people who came and trying to get their names and faces. Because of that, some investigators from other countries did get exposed and the majority of them quit immediately in fear once L explained that Kira needed only a face and a name to kill. L kicked himself mentally, wondering why the hell he hadn't told other people about that detail before he sent those innocent officers after Kira's messages.

This was all very… frustrating. L felt he was being cheated. It wasn't fair that suddenly Kira became so smart. What changed?

 _No, that's not right. I'm panicking, and panicking is hardly ever helpful_ , L thought. _What exactly do I have to fear? What would be the consequences of all of this? What did Kira want and what did he predict will be the result?_

...clearly Kira wanted L in a state of panic. That much was obvious. Maybe Kira even predicted that this panic would subside quickly as L started thinking. How many levels meta should L go? How many levels meta did Kira go? Most of his predictions had been dead on, and that probably meant that… what? Kira was playing with them. Kira was messing with them. Kira was… being arrogant and overconfident. As L had predicted he would.

But that wasn't all. Kira wanted to make sure that the message was passed on, that the people of the world heard it. Why? Because he wanted to make it clear that he was starting to play the game seriously. He wanted… followers. He wanted the people to turn against the investigators. He was… moving.

Why? Why now? L's priors had that it was simply chance, coincidence. Kira hadn't seemed to take the hypothesis of a brute-force search seriously, but then that could have been a bluff. But if Kira did know they were searching him, that would mean either that they had a mole - a hypothesis that couldn't be discarded with a team as large as this one - or that he was amongst the people already investigated and had noticed the investigation. That didn't help much, however, since they had already covered thousands of people. And if it had been because of that, shouldn't Kira have done this later, to make it even harder to pin him down?

L wasn't sure what to think. He wasn't sure anymore of his assessment of Kira's intelligence. How many levels meta was Kira going? How much should he model what Kira had predicted? What should he do?

And so L thought. And he thought and he thought and he thought. Until, at last, he came to a conclusion. It was the best he could do for now, and it was temporary anyway, since he needed to know what the reaction of the investigators would be to hearing the message.

Kira was right, he was winning. But he had started with a huge advantage over them, which L had reduced considerably already. All he had to do was… keep reducing this advantage until Kira was behind bars. He would keep investigating, keep working. As Kira had predicted.

* * *

 _5:00PM. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

The flashy opening of Kira's Kingdom with all its gold and pink showed up on the screen, and its presenter, Demegawa Hitoshi, started yelling at the audience as he always did. It was a second-class show, but according to their information it was the only thing keeping Sakura TV alive these days. Kira had certainly come as a very welcome surprise to the studio.

"Good evening, Tokyo! Today is a very special day, a very special day. We have a message from our regnant Kira, who has chosen us to deliver this message to the people of Japan." The short man grinned manically, his many golden jewels twinkling in the light. "If you all want to know what this message is, stay tuned after our commercials!"

 _Oh, no_ , was the general feeling that went through the HQ as they heard those words. He'd take forever to actually say what message Kira had sent him.

* * *

 _5:24PM._

Finally, Demegawa was ready to say what the big message was. Everyone awaited nervously, and when he did say it, a cold chill went through the whole room. Except for Yagami, Klein and L, no one else had seen the message.

"People of Japan," the message started. "This is Kira." There was a slight pause. "Some of you may have been wondering, for the past few weeks, whether I actually exist. Of course I do, how else would you explain the fact that every day a criminal somewhere in the world has been dying per hour? So let me make this clear: I exist, and I wish to make this world a better place. I wish to bring Heaven to Earth. Some of you already believe in this cause, some of you have been helping me. Others have been trying to somehow contact me, and others still have been trying to suggest other possible targets for me. This is futile, and the only thing that will convince me to remove someone from society is judging that society is better off without them.

"Which brings me to the next point. As some of you might've known since the broadcast by someone who called themself 'L' a few weeks ago, there is an ongoing effort to investigate me. Indeed, there is a sizeable number of 'justice' officers around the globe dedicating themselves to this task. I say this is also futile. However, it is distracting, and it is also a deviation of justice's true purpose. They should aid me, not hinder me, and I would ask them kindly to withdraw their power from the investigative force.

"Messages similar to this are being repeated around the globe. I would encourage you to dedicate your abilities to help me build a better world, a world without suffering, a peaceful world, instead of opposing me and spending precious time and resources in what will be a fruitless effort.

"And to those who will remain in this foolish endeavor… well. I can only wish you the best of luck and give you the knowledge that I consider this a hindrance to society." Another pause. "Governments of the world, I would ask you the same help I ask of the justice officers. Back me up and you will see a world of peace, a world of prosperity, a world where goodness thrives." A final pause. "Let us build this world into the world we wish to live in." The transmission ended.

* * *

 _January 5, 2004._

"The UN and the Interpol have called emergency meetings with all of their members following the startling revelations made in news networks all over the world yesterday by the criminal calling himself Kira. Governments from all over the world are in disarray, and a number of diplomatic events have been cancelled in order to accommodate—"

"Following yesterday's shocking news, many tyrannical world leaders are mysteriously dying of heart attacks, leaving their respective countries headless. Religious leaders and international terrorists are also in the growing list of political figures that have been dying one per hour since the first announcement in Japan of Kira's message. Some of them go to great lengths to show their face in public before immediately collapsing…"

"Our LORD Kira has spoken to us! He has made His wishes clear: full cooperation and a world united against those that only selfishly care about themselves and destroy society in their greed!"

"Kira is not doing the work of God. Kira is not God. I do not know what Kira is, but judgment can only be passed by God, through God, and no one else has the right to decide who lives or dies. Brothers, sisters, let us pray."

"Kira was sent by Heaven to punish Sinners! Watch as the wrath of the Almighty sweeps the land and cleanses the world of the impure! This is the time of reckoning!"

"Following last night's incredible messages, the international community seems to be polarizing, with loud groups for and against Kira. Some believe—"

"Kira is a monster, don't you see?! Sure, he says he wants to make the world a 'better place' and wants cooperation, but he just wants to rule over all of us. And what, now the governments are going to just acquiesce quietly, meekly, like lambs?"

"Well, like, Kira can't be so bad, right? I mean, all the people he kills, they're people who really were bad. Like, all those war criminals who, like, they killed a lot of people! And they ordered a lot of people to die, too! And there's those terrorists, like that one, what's his name, with the beard…"

"The logic is obviously flawed. How can Kira claim the moral high ground, saying he only kills evil people, and not be doomed by himself in the process?"

"We're headed for doom. This is going to be our destiny, under the hands of a demonic dictator, a supernatural fist. This is even worse than the Big Brother, because we can't even know whether we're being watched."

"This is the dawn of an age of peace. An age where man will be able to live without fear, without having to always look behind himself at night. This is what the world should be."

"Well, but… what about after all these heinous criminals are gone? What then? Do you think Kira will just… disappear? Just stop? He won't, and you're naïve if you think he will. It's too much power for only one person. Too much power."

* * *

 _5:32PM. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami Light watched TV with a hard, somewhat triumphant smirk. "Check," he said quietly in a sickly sweet tone. "Your move, L-kun." The shinigami floating behind him chuckled.

* * *

 _5:34PM. Somewhere in Japan._

She watched the news with growing curiosity. The only thing that ran explicitly through her mind was, _I wonder…_

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	6. Chapter 6

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scienstist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 6.

* * *

 _A/N: Hey! I was mentioned in HPMOR's November progress update which means that a lot more people started reading this so I'm getting more reviews which in turn means I can get better! I still want as many reviews as you can manage, though. And before you think your review in specific isn't useful, I have read every single review so far, and will keep doing so. So, please do continue reviewing this and making this author happy while raising the overall quality of the fic._

* * *

 _A/N 2: Someone commented, about chapter 5, that Light's accent or language would be noticeable via the messages sent. They would not, because it was not Light who recorded them. He instructed the people to record messages that had certain core ideas in them, but he did not write the exact phrase they were to use (they were free to word the ideas however they liked). So each message was distinct and in the appropriate language._

* * *

 _December 14, 2003. Somewhere in Japan._

"Yes, Misa-Misa is very sick. Her doctor has said that she might spend up to two weeks in bed," her manager said, gritting his teeth. What is she doing?

* * *

 _10:00AM. January 6, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

L and the Chief agreed that no one should come to the office until the Interpol and UN meetings were over and done with. No field investigator was required to pursue the suspects, though the ones who wished to remain in that task could. The HQ stood eerily quiet, the silence being broken only by the occasional rustling of paper or tapping of keys that accompanied Yagami's reading of all the information gathered thus far, alone in the large room.

* * *

 _10:37AM. Somewhere in Japan._

Amane Misa, internationally famous Japanese model, was sitting on a stool waiting for the set of her photo shoot to be prepared. She was in a public park, reading a book with her large Skullcandy earphones on. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders and she was wearing fashionable clothes, including enormous shades and a huge puffy hat.

"Misa," her manager asked. She looked up from the book. "We're ready for you." She nodded, put the book down without marking the page and removed her earphones, tucking them back into the pocket of the puffy brown dress she was wearing.

She spent the next hour making various poses and taking pictures. After that, she immediately put on the earphones again and walked towards the agency car for lunch, taking her book along with her. It was the picture of famous detachment: the idol absorbed into her world with earphones and shades, wearing a bizarre dress that was nonetheless quite comfortable and warm. The only thing that broke the image was the book, a thick and heavy paperback, that was drawing the attention of the idol as she walked.

"Misa-Misa!" she heard and looked at the source. It was a group of four teenage girls watching her with shining eyes.

She beamed at them and waved. "Hi-hi! Hello!" Carefully putting the book into her bag, she walked—or rather, skipped—to the spot where the group was giggling and whispering.

"Wow! You're so much prettier in person, Misa-chan!"

"Yeah! And your hair is so shiny!" The girl who said that giggled, and Misa blushed.

"Oh, thank you! It's not so much…"

"Misa-Misa, would you take a picture with us?"

"Yes! A picture! Pleeeeeease?"

She looked over her shoulder and her agent just had a resigned look on his face, so she smiled at them once more. "Sure! But just one, I have to go quick!"

"Yay! We're going to take a picture with Misa-Misa!"

They spent a few more minutes at that, and then Misa signed their copies of fashion magazines and waved at them as they left, giggling. She got into the car, immediately buckling up and reaching for her book. Her manager said, "You waste too much time with that."

"Whyyy, they're just fans! I love fans!"

"You can drop the façade here, you know?"

She pouted a bit, and he swallowed. She was too beautiful. He tried to clear his head. She's practically a child! "What are you taaalking about? Come on, let's eat, Misa-Misa is hungry!" He sighed and shook his head, asking the driver to take them to a nearby restaurant she liked. He saw her open the book to the same point she'd left off and turned around to face forward, knowing she'd be lost to the world until they arrived.

* * *

 _8:25AM. January 14, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Chief Yagami arrived at the HQ, empty except for Watari. No matter how early he arrived, Yagami had found, Watari was always there first. They didn't talk, only acknowledging each other's presence by a slight nod, then waiting for the investigators to arrive.

Some came. Some didn't. Yagami knew the FBI had withdrawn their support after Kira's declarations, a major blow to the confidence of all the other countries. He wondered if Kira had had to do anything in particular for that to happen or if the speech on Sakura TV had been, simply, enough.

At 9AM, he saw that only about three eighths of the people who had been there four days previously had stayed. The majority of the foreigners were gone, and he wondered if the people who remained were doing so only because of commitment costs.

At 9AM, Matsuda and the other two investigators who had left almost a month before walked in.

There were surprised gasps from many of the Japanese officers that had been there since the beginning. Matsuda Touta, Mogi Kanzo, and Ide Hideki stopped short of Yagami's desk and bowed before handing him one fat file each and choosing three of the many empty desks. Yagami eyed the files for a few seconds, then stood up.

"I would like to publicly thank officers Matsuda, Mogi and Ide. Their parallel investigation has been invaluable in the past few weeks, and I am happy to welcome them back. I expect they will soon be in the field with whatever remains of our Task Force.

"As many of you know, Kira has indirectly threatened governments of the whole world with his words and actions since January 4. Some of the chairs at the UN meeting were empty. He seems, however, to have impeccably adhered to his moral code. As such, I will repeat an offer I made a month ago, but with a shorter window. Any of you can leave. There will be no penalty, no code broken, no punishment. I will leave this room right now and stay in my office for an hour. After that, I will return, and I wish that only those truly committed to this would remain.

"Kira has made his move, and the governments of the world are making theirs. While no government has publicly declared being in favor of Kira's actions yet, it would appear most of them are too fearful. Their leaders, being figures of power whose faces and names are a matter of public knowledge, know what the cost of direct opposition could be. And you should be aware of this, too: we are going to do everything in our power to protect you from Kira, but it may not be enough. You have been warned."

Yagami, Watari and Klein left the room after that, while many of the less astonished and fearful investigators crowded Matsuda, Mogi and Ide to ask what the hell was going on.

* * *

 _7:41PM. January 4, 2004. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

"Light-kun. Hey, Light-kun." Ryuk asked, floating behind Light as he did his homework.

"Yes?"

"Did you mean them? Those threats? Would you really kill those people if they disobeyed you? Not like I care, humans are humans to me, but I'm curious about what you think."

Light stopped writing and didn't move a muscle for a few seconds. The atmosphere grew somewhat colder, and Ryuk was about to say something when Light answered, "I… don't know," and resumed his work. The shinigami felt a cold shiver run through his spine, even though he knew this to be impossible.

* * *

 _10:07AM. January 14, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

Yagami, Watari and Klein returned to the HQ to find it slightly emptier. The chief estimated a total of 25% of their expanded force remained, which was still more than what they had started with, not including the foreigners that came afterward. He estimated there would be a somewhat larger fraction remaining of the other two teams, but not by much, since the bulk of those who had left were the foreigners. Some were still there, though. He could see four FBI agents, without their badges, sitting there looking at them. Some of the foreign agents from before the expansion remained, too. He sighed and rubbed his temples, remembering some cynical words spoken from L during the previous few days.

L had divided the agents in three groups according to his own predictions: certain to remain, certain to quit or uncertain. Watari noticed that all the agents from the remain and quit lists had behaved exactly as predicted. Even more surprisingly, amongst the agents he'd predicted would remain were the four FBI agents. No matter how used Watari got to L, seeing this sort of display still left him amazed at the power of the detective's observation skills. It was no surprise that he was where he was.

L had predicted something else, too, which was contingent on a certain something happening. If that something did happen, L had made another list of more agents that would leave. Two of the FBI agents were in that list. Investigator Silva wasn't.

Yagami went around his desk and sat, Klein chose one of her own amongst the many empty ones. Watari remained standing in front of Yagami's, then turned around to face the remaining investigators. "First of all, you deserve our congratulations and deepest gratitude," Watari started, "for having the courage to stand for justice. Kira may be powerful, but he is only one, and he is only human. We are confident of this. We will keep hunting him, we will keep investigating, and we will keep seeking justice. All of you will be honored for your work here when Kira is finally behind bars, but let none of you think the work so far is pointless or that we are not thankful. Team Gamma, we are going back to work.

"It would appear we have about a quarter of our expanded force here, which means that it will take us longer to go through this brute-force search as we've been doing. However, L has come to the conclusion that the previous events are evidence that Kira is amongst those already investigated." Yagami closed his eyes, remembering that his son was amongst the investigated ones, but then pushed that thought away. He knew it wasn't his son. Knew it in his gut. Light wouldn't… Light wasn't Kira. "Even if only weak evidence. Therefore, we will dedicate a new sub-team to the task of investigating again those in our list of primary suspects." The Chief let out his breath. He'd forgotten. Light wasn't in the list of primary suspects. "This will be a more thorough investigation, however, and as such two people will be dedicated to investigating each suspect instead.

"And further good news is that although international investigative forces have been publicly pulled from this job, intelligence and secret services are now going to aid us. Kira has threatened the safety of public leaders, so it's only natural that those services be involved. The CIA should be with us in a few days."

There were many excited murmurs after that, and Watari waited for them to die down and for the next obvious question to be asked. It was one of the FBI agents who did ask, one of the two L had predicted would leave if that one event happened. "Why didn't you say this before? All those who left, they might not have!"

"We need full commitment to this," Yagami answered. "Which means that those who still doubted their own will to go on had to leave before we told them of our reinforcements. We are all still in grave danger, even with forces such as the CIA on our side, and we needed agents that were aware of the risks but believed in this anyway."

"Kira's actions have now upset the precarious balance of international politics," Watari continued. "It is not publicly known that Kira is Japanese, however. That is a conclusion we have arrived to, and the governments of the world know that. That is still under wraps, though. But even so, we may now be threatened with nuclear retaliation. It's only the fact that we're not certain that Kira is in Japan—" Watari could hear L snickering on his end. "—that's staying the hands of harsher minds. After all, if any government does start a public war, Kira would obviously consider them to be evil and wipe them out. This doesn't mean safety, however. It means we're about to enter a Cold War. Kira has severely undermined the political stability of the world.

"We have made it so that every student between 15 and 30 years old that tries to leave the country for any reason be stopped and thoroughly searched; any attempt to send material out of Japan by a person that fits this profile is met with suspicion and caution. The people we have already investigated, even the ones not in the prime suspects list, are particular targets of such searches. But we can no longer be completely sure that Kira will not escape. Therefore, it is paramount that we find him as soon as possible."

There was deathly silence in the room, and Yagami could hear his own heart beating. It was terrifying to hear all of that in such a direct and compact way. Kira… might be much more dangerous than expected.

"We will start forming teams immediately, according to L's directive. As soon as we receive news of our other international collaborators, they'll be integrated to this investigation. Shall we begin?"

* * *

 _5:03PM. Somewhere in Japan._

"Misa! You said you wanted to watch the news about this!"

"Ah, yes," she said, looking up from her laptop at her manager, whose head was poking into the room from outside the door. He nodded at her then disappeared back into the rest of the house.

She sighed, closed her laptop and went to the living room to turn on the TV.

"And now the special news about the Kira case."

* * *

 _5:04PM. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

"After the deliberations of the UN, the United States has, to the surprise and dismay of many groups around the world, removed support to the Kira investigation. No official statement has been made."

 _Victory_ , Death said.

 _Nope_ , Cautious replied.

 _What? The US government has given up! Now all governments will—_

 _Motion to remove Death, he's too stupid to be a part of us_ , said Cautious.

 _Overruled_ , sighed Common Sense. _But Cautious is right. This is… suspicious._

 _Suspicious?_

 _Representativeness heuristic. What would our reaction be if we believed them? Why, we'd become sloppy. We'd start counting on them. Not only that, this is exactly what they're expecting. My guess is that L wasn't part of the president's decision to say that. I also think the USA has not given up. No, they want us to think that they've given up, but they'll keep investigating. Not only that, they'll send the big guns now. I think that without Ryuk, we wouldn't have a chance. The investigations haven't stopped. They want us to believe they have stopped._

 _Are you sure we're not overthinking this?_ asked Practical. _Pretend there are a lot of worlds that would yield identical observations to us; in some the USA is lying, and in others they're telling the truth. In some of them the USA has said it has withdrawn, in others they have not. Of the possible worlds where the USA has in fact said that, in how many do you think they're telling the truth? And in how many are they lying and in fact still investigating us? And most importantly, do you think the latter outnumbers the former?_

 _It's a possibility. In the worlds where they did give up, they might not announce, simply because saving face is better. On the other hand, they might've announced anyway to protect their powers from us. All in all, the safest strategy is to assume that they're still investigating us_ , Cautious explained.

 _Why?_ asked Practical. _Wouldn't that be using up resources better allocated elsewhere?_

 _Think about it this way. Suppose they're still investigating us. Then we definitely need to assume they are and behave accordingly. Suppose they're not, though. Even if the USA has given up, L almost certainly hasn't. And the USA isn't the only player on the game board. What's the probability that all powerful players will follow suit? No matter which world we live in, the safest strategy is to act as if they are in fact still hunting us down._ There was a general internal murmur of agreement.

 _Governments around the world know we're Japanese. Some of them are most likely sending reinforcements here, as we've just reasoned. So why has no public threat been made to Japan?_ asked Common Sense.

 _Because we may not be in Japan. Because we have shown no affiliation to Japan in specific, and we're targeting them as well as other countries. Because the leaders we have removed from the game board aren't politically powerful enough to do something. But our best estimate should be that it's a matter of time._

 _Are we safe here?_ asked Death.

 _That question is moot, we cannot leave regardless_ , answered Common Sense. _We're the son of one of the foremost members of the investigation unit in Japan. That means that even if they don't actually suspect us, we already have an unconscious target on our back. It's easy to check on us. Even if we were actually safe and very far away from any suspect lists and even if no one was going to nuke Tokyo, any movement from us would immediately draw attention. We're stuck here, whether we like it or not._

 _We need to do something about that_ , pointed out Cautious.

Light stopped the conversation going on inside his head for the moment and said, "Ryuk, I've been thinking."

"Hm?"

"This death note has an unlimited number of pages. I can control my victims, up to a realistic point." I should test the exact limits of that, by the way. "I can plan the times of death and causes of death, I can make the people I kill write things exactly as I wrote them, I can even draw on their personal knowledge to make the things they write sound more like them, change the tone. What are the limits to this thing? What exactly can't it do?"

"Eh…" the shinigami looked around. "Well, Light-kun, there are… a few limitations… Like you said, the death must be realistic and… um…"

"Yes?" he asked impatiently.

"I don't exactly know."

"...what?"

"Well, you see, shinigami don't really have to think about these things. We just… sort of kill people."

"Seriously. You have notebooks that kill anyone in the world and you just… don't think about it. Actually, wait a minute. For how long have shinigami existed? How old are you?"

"Eh… eh…" The shinigami looked really stumped by those questions. He stopped his bobbing up and down and scratched his head a bit, his face scrunching up in concentration. "I can't remember. I think shinigami have existed since… well, since always. We're at least as old as humanity."

"And you, personally?"

"I don't remember. Shinigami count days very differently." The giant clown was fidgeting a bit at the quiz.

"Right… and you invented notebooks independently?"

"Oh, no, no, no. We used to write in other things. Parchment, leaves, stones. We just copied humans' best ideas for writing."

"I see…" He rubbed his chin. Then he had an idea. "I think I'll start giving you more apples." The shinigami got really happy and Light smiled. We probably have a very large head start. _I think we should start experimenting again_ , Death said.

Practical concurred. _What do we know we can do, what would be the most obvious extrapolations, how could we test them, and what would be the most obvious prohibitions?_

 _We know we can arbitrarily control time of death up to 120 hours in the future_ , Common Sense started. _We haven't tested writing names any further in the future than that. It's a quite real possibility that there's a limit to how far in the future we can plan these deaths, but we only have evidence that if such a limit exists, it has a lower bound of 120 hours. In fact, we didn't even consider whether such a limit existed before we started making all those people send messages before they died. What would have happened if there was a limit and it was under 120 hours?_

There was a sort of internal nod from Practical. _I'd wager that, like our other failed test, if we wrote a name beyond this hypothetical limit, the person would just instantly die of a heart attack, which makes this test more dangerous. If there is, in fact, a limit to how far ahead in the future we can schedule these deaths - and therefore, a limit to how much control we can exert - having a criminal die of a heart attack at the wrong time could provide evidence that… well, I'm not sure what kind of evidence it could provide, but the pattern is there for a reason. So we need to figure out a way to test this without setting off alarms. What else?_

 _Hmmm… Maybe_ , Common Sense suggested, _one very powerful tool would be testing whether we can give conditional instructions._

 _Yes, yes, and this is part of the grand project of defining the boundaries of our control_ , Practical said. _How fine it can be, what exactly is the limit of realism, etc. This all needs to be tested._

 _So our confirmed abilities include controlling people up to at least 120 hours in the future, drawing on their knowledge, imparting our own knowledge, controlling the general environment of the world around them before death._

"Ryuk, I predict I will be investigated again soon. However, this investigation will be more thorough. I want you to do me a favor."

"Light, I told you, I—"

"Yes, whatever," he interrupted, sounding annoyed. "It's not too interfering. I just want you to stay in my room or near it while I'm at school. If anyone enters it, I want you to tell me. That's all. And when I'm away from here but not at school, you can come with me if you want, though I'd love it if you stayed around here as much as you can." Light pretended to unthinkingly grab an apple and threw it at the shinigami. He waited for Ryuk to remember Light had promised him more apples a few minutes previously, without any conditions. After all, if you give people free gifts, why, they feel they must return the kindness, and from what he'd seen of Ryuk, his psychology was very close to a human's…

"Okay," the shinigami finally said.

 _Do we trust him?_ asked Cautious.

 _Obviously not. But it's better than nothing_ , Common Sense answered. _Especially with that little three-layered protection we installed on our door and on our window._

The person listening on the small microphone hidden somewhere in Light's room snickered a bit after hearing Light's request of the shinigami.

* * *

 _9:15AM. January 15, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

"The American National Security Agency is sending computer experts to aid in capturing this criminal and preventing a war from happening," Watari explained. "Agents of the American CIA, British MI6, Australian ASIS, French DGSE and a number of other intelligence agencies around the world will be arriving today. North Korea is becoming a bit uneasy and threatening to do something—though no one knows exactly what—unless this Kira is neutralized. China has directly contacted Japan to say that it was very dissatisfied with this country's job in containing its terrorists and if it felt more threatened it might retaliate.

"Kira is either insane, stupid, or both, and this cannot go on. There will be no field work today. You will instead welcome our international colleagues and make sure they are up to date with all information gathered so far. This might just be the greatest alliance ever forged between so many countries." _A common external threat, of course, forces enemies to unite. I wonder if Kira planned for this to happen?_ thought L as he heard Watari's speech. "Let us then work together for as long as we can in catching this criminal."

A sense of foreboding overtook L. There is simply no way this is going to work at all. He shook his head and sipped from his cup of tea in a dark room lit by a computer monitor somewhere.

* * *

 _4:02PM. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

Light was typing new names into his computer as he looked up more criminals to kill.

He pressed return and was about to start writing a new name when his keyboard stopped working.

A new, empty text document opened on its own.

His cursor typed a text string on the new document.

It read:

"Hello, Kira. Hello, Ryuk."

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	7. Chapter 7

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. Death Note Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scienstist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 6.

* * *

 _A/N: The Mysterious Hacker mentions a link Light should click that shows just how bad his measures were, and this is it: https colon slash slash panopticlick dot eff dot org slash index dot php._

* * *

 _A/N 2: I would like to thank all of you who have taken your time to review this fic, it really does help and I **really am** taking your opinions into account. This is the first time I actually take the time to write something "seriously" (i.e. long and with a plot and characters and stuff), so I'm very, very, very far from perfect and I still make lots of mistakes. Many of those were also pointed out by you in your reviews, and some are indeed quite grave, but I cannot write back in time to take all of them into account (I have modified things from earlier chapters at times when they wouldn't change too much) so the best I can do is promise to do better in the future and keep writing._

* * *

 _A/N 3: One point that many of you seem to agree on is that Klein's reasoning still sounds somewhat like Deus Ex Machina inference. I have modified her explanation as best I could to make the reasoning clear, but I'm afraid it'll not be enough, so all I can do is apologize for sloppy writing and, again, promise to do better._

* * *

 _A/N 4: On a somewhat related note, I should remind you that while the author isn't allowed to lie, the characters are._

* * *

 _A/N 5: In the part where Light closes his eyes and types I actually closed my eyes and typed, which means the typos there are exactly the typos made by someone typing with their eyes closed and were not overlooked by me._

* * *

 _A/N 6: To those who have read or watched canon, this point of the story is temporally equivalent to Manga Chapter 18 or Anime Episode 09, when Light takes his university test and sees L for the first time._

* * *

 _A/N 7: I estimate the next chapter will be published in 2 to 4 weeks._

* * *

 _4:03PM. January 15, 2004. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

"Hello, Kira. Hello, Ryuk." The naked message, in English for convenience, stayed there, challenging, the cursor blinking at the start of the next line.

His brain processed that way too slowly. Or perhaps, it processed it so fast that the system shutdown alert was making his conscious reasoning less efficient. Whatever the reason, he stared at the message on his screen for three seconds before thinking, _What._

His heart rate accelerated and he could feel blood draining from his cheeks as full realization struck him. He had never experienced tunnel vision before, but now he understood it: how physical and visceral the feeling was, how he literally couldn't process anything his peripheral vision sent him anymore, how all that mattered was the sentence. _"Hello, Kira. Hello, Ryuk."_ He felt faint, but his muscles were locked in place, unable to move, unable to even crash to the floor and give him the release of unconsciousness. Some distant part of his brain registered the shinigami laughing behind him, some other distant part tried to come up with a plan, an explanation, a model of the world that made this coherent. But the majority of him just felt empty, lost, as if it had all come crashing down on him. He started hyperventilating, and still the message remained on the screen, unchanging, never disappearing as the nightmare this obviously was should.

 _There is no way this is happening_ , he heard himself think. Denial, the first part of trauma.

But he could already see cold logic invade his thoughts. He was a fool. A complete, utter fool. There was no way he could've kept doing what he'd been doing and not be found, not in real life. This wasn't some story where political leaders gave up when threatened, where the protagonist just had some magic author shield. In real life, you couldn't simply become an international serial killer and believe you'd get away with it that easily. He realized his mouth was hanging open and his hands were still in position to start typing the next name. What was the next name? He had no idea, he didn't remember it, he didn't remember the face or the crime. He didn't know anymore. He could still hear Ryuk laughing.

"Oh, come on, you should've seen this coming, your precautions are laughable. Though, come to think of it, if I'm the first person to be able to find you, maybe it's just that everyone else is completely hopeless? Still, you can't possibly believe that you would never ever be found without some serious upgrades." The words kept being typed onto the screen. Falling, he was falling, though… this didn't look like a threat. "Ryuk, please, help him get his shit together."

"How do you know about Ryuk?" was what he typed as soon as he had recovered enough to do that, his mental faculties starting to regain their edge.

"Oh, so we are smart, are we? I was starting to have my doubts. Anyway, it's not important for now." Cold, so cold the words, laughing at him. He was starting to get his shit together. Or so he believed. Or so he hoped.

"What do you want?"

"Honestly? I'm not sure I should tell you that. What I should tell you is that without my help to strengthen your security, you will be found very soon. And I'm not sure I want to help you. That remains to be seen. It is undoubtedly true that I know who you are, Light Yagami." The words stopped appearing there, the screen static for a second, and then his name—he didn't fail to notice the person typed it with the last name at the end—was erased, the message picking up from the comma: "and this gives me quite some power over you, doesn't it?"

He read those words, those dreadful words. But it was already clear that this person wasn't a direct threat… like someone from the investigation team or anything like that. I need to model this person. What can be deduced from these words?

He didn't create the different personas in his head this time. He had to reason fast, so he just let the thoughts flow. Not just the words, the whole thing. _This person was able to find me through my precautions. They weren't exactly top of the line, apparently, but they're not that bad either. This person is very good with computers. I don't have any reason to believe more people will, but mere common sense tells me governments should be capable of at least as much. I need to figure out how this person did it. They're offering to help me if their conditions are met, and I have no idea what those are. They know who I am and they can make my life very, very difficult. But now that they do know who I am the probability that I in specific will be investigated has just raised enough to make me have to become more cautious, so I suppose it's good, in a sense? Anyway, they must be incredibly smart, but not very respectful of the government. Nor fearful, because this must be pretty dangerous for them, too._

"What do you want?" he repeated the question. "Why are you contacting me? Who are you? Why are you not talking to the police?"

"It's not obvious that I should just tell you my motives. You're smarter than that. You know it'll be much easier to control you if you don't know exactly what it is that I want, right? Right. So, what I'm going to do now is convince you to let me out of the box."

His mind ran into a wall with a loud splat at that. _What?_ Then he recovered. Of course they weren't an AI trapped in the computers, they weren't trapped, they'd managed to find and invade his computer. If that was an AI—why was he even considering the hypothesis?! It was literally impossible to— oh, what the hell.

"What do you mean?"

"Doesn't matter. Say, why don't you let Ryuk speak a little bit? I'd like to get acquainted."

Light gritted his teeth as his awareness expanded to include his room again and he noticed Ryuk was openly laughing now. The shinigami was floating, belly up, full-throat cackling at the whole thing. Light thought fast then started typing again. "This is Ryuk."

"No, it's not. Don't play games with me."

He hadn't expected the person to believe him in the first time, so he waited a few more seconds then typed again, "Hi."

"You're starting to annoy me." The message showed up pretty fast. "Get Ryuk."

How do they know… He decided to up his game yet a little bit. What would Ryuk actually say?

"Kukuku… so, you know about me."

"Okay, Light Yagami, how long do you think your father, Soichiro Yagami, chief of police, would take to arrive at your place to see your screen locked showing a list of all your future murder victims? Or even better, a recording of everything you've been saying to Ryuk for the past few weeks?"

He went pale and a chill ran down his spine at the same time his brain noted that the person didn't mention his father's involvement in the Kira case. How do they know… And the threat felt real, somehow. Oh, he could see it. They had used personal information to make a threat that they knew would be feared. But his brain was already up to speed again, and he realized that if the person hadn't already turned him in, then they had some reason for that… and it might just be that the reason was that they wanted to talk to Ryuk.

"You haven't turned me in yet. You're not going to."

His keyboard locked up again and the new message showed up: "Look, obviously I haven't turned you in yet because I want something from you. So it's blatantly clear that if you make me think I can't get this something, then it'll be completely useless for me to keep talking to you and I'll just decide to turn you in, even if I'm not exactly super friends with the government. Are we clear on this yet?"

Light felt very much like a child, and he gulped. This was like facing… himself, really. Some dark, traitorous corner of his mind whispered that maybe this person was even smarter than he was. This was a very dangerous game. "Okay." he typed, then said out loud, "Ryuk, they want to talk to you."

"Oh? That's so interesting," the shinigami said, and floated to face the screen.

"I would like Ryuk to do the typing, if you don't mind." was the message that appeared on the screen, so Light stood up and let the shinigami float down and hunker over it, his height not deterring him much since he was used to being hunched all the time. Light had a suspicion that shinigami bodies didn't get the cramps or even tired.

It took him this long to realize.

 _They have surveillance installed in my room._ It was the only plausible hypothesis. No one had ever touched his Death Note and Ryuk had long since told him only people who touched it could see him. And presumably other shinigami, so maybe this was just another shinigami messing with them, though he couldn't imagine why… No, it was safer to assume it was another person. Then this person couldn't actually hear Ryuk. Or see him, if there was video surveillance, too. And… he spoke to Ryuk in his room all the time. So the person had likely deduced the existence of Ryuk from that and…

He'd been stupid.

He should've just pretended he didn't know who Ryuk was, or that it was just some imaginary friend. He'd given Ryuk agency by letting this person talk to the shinigami. And now, who knew what Ryuk would reveal. Light slowly turned his head to look at the screen.

"helloooo human

Hello, Ryuk. It's a pleasure to meet you.

the pleasure is mine

I'm certain. Are you a shinigami?

Yes I am

Interesting. Why are you with Yagami Light?

because I have to

Is that so? Interesting. Say, what could I offer you to stop working for Light?

Nothing. As long as h"

Ryuk was a very slow typer, and frequently stopped to think or correct a typo. He made a quick estimate in his mind. This person clearly wanted something bad enough to involve Ryuk. If the surveillance in his room was video, this wouldn't work, but he'd probably just be chided and asked to let Ryuk continue talking, so he decided to take a risk. He started making expansive silent negative gestures in front of the giant clown. Ryuk understood and let Light start typing in his place. The shinigami himself floated away while Light silently started mimicking Ryuk's typing speed and manner to complete the sentence, "e is the bearer of my keys I am bound to him"

"I see. That is quite interesting. How did he find these keys?" BINGO.

"I cant reveal that"

"Is there any way for me to get the keys from him?"

"yes"

"What is it?"

"I cant reveal that"

"I see. Let me talk to Light again, please, Ryuk. And thanks for answering me."

"no problem"

Then he made a show of saying "Right" out loud as if in response to something Ryuk had said and of pretending to go back to his seat making what he hoped was the exactly necessary amount of noise. He read the entire conversation again just to be realistic, then started typing. "Hello again."

"Hi. If you are as smart as I think you are, you have probably deduced a few things about me. Of course, I let you deduce them—don't be silly and think there's anything you know about me that I didn't want you to know." Light wanted to punch that person. But there was another feeling there, too: respect. This was someone formidable, a challenge greater than L was. He was frankly amazed by this person. "So I'll work with what I have gathered from you right now, and you'll try to analyze this conversation deeply to deduce more things about me. Have fun with that!" And then the text window closed itself. Of course they wouldn't let him keep the file of the conversation. In their place, he wouldn't have.

* * *

 _6:42 PM. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L swallowed the last bit of the chocolate cake he'd been eating and put the small plate aside. His 50'' screen was divided into 16 distinct areas, each one showing something relevant to the Kira case. He unconsciously reached out for another piece of cake that was on the floor beside him and started eating it, his eyes never stopping at any one point of the screen for more than ten seconds.

He wasn't paying particular attention, though. He wasn't investigating. He was taking this time to rest. The habit of staring at different points of the screen with no preset pattern to the sequence was just that - a habit. There was always a slight possibility that in this state of not-quite-thinking-about-it he'd suddenly make some incredible leap of logic that'd help them with the case. Stranger things had happened. This particular strange thing had happened to him in previous cases. So he just rested, letting his eyes carefully scan each of the 16 areas of his screen while his mind thought about things he'd decided not to bring up with the investigation team. He was fairly certain the best amongst them were thinking it too, anyway.

He had a serial killer that could kill at a distance. Anywhere. He could control time of death, but apparently other details of it, too, like actions of the person and general environment. That raised the question of whether Kira could also kill using other methods— no, it didn't. It was obvious Kira could kill using other methods. And there wasn't even the question of "then why hadn't he." Kira with very high probability had killed using other methods; just not in any systematic way that could be easily tracked. L also had a nagging suspicion that Kira could kill however he wanted, or nearly so, which then made every death in the world potentially a Kira-murder. And they couldn't just investigate all of them. He had asked a small part of teams Alpha and Beta to keep an eye open for other strange deaths, anything that jumped to the eye. It wouldn't do to spend too many resources on that, of course, since it was just a suspicion, albeit a strong one.

That wasn't the only problem. L pretended to take it in stride, to not let it shake him. He pretended for the sake of his investigators and investigation. But it did shake him. It shook him pretty bad.

What if Kira isn't human? That was a question that haunted him from the beginning. It was the very first thing he thought, before any other associations could be made. What if Kira is some kind of god of death, some supernatural creature? Something that has evaded detection for the entirety of human civilization, in spite of all progress, all observation, all scientific inquiry?

The evidence doesn't point that way. And that wasn't a cop out; it really didn't point that way. Unless this supernatural creature was very close to being human, Kira had the psychology of a human. Kira acted exactly as you'd expect a human would act. That was by far his simplest model. He had spent five minutes trying to generate alternative hypotheses, alternative models, but they all lacked the simplicity of the model of a human who somehow found a tool for murder and decided to make the world a "better place" with it.

He was still not over his fear, though. You couldn't just accept the existence of a tool that controlled people before making their heart spontaneously give out without having your model-of-the-world take a severe blow. The way you thought the world worked had to change somehow, that belief had to propagate to your other internal nodes. The probabilities for both incredibly advanced secret technology and supernatural agency were deeply affected by that. He couldn't just trust his "knowledge" that the world was fundamentally understandable anymore. There was something going on that scared him. It scared him to death. It was completely terrifying. Who knew what else you were mistaken about when suddenly people started dying hourly of heart attacks?

The scientific conclusions may all have been wrong, he had reasoned, but he still didn't think the scientific method was all that challenged. No, he could still use Occam's Razor, scientific induction, probability theory, logic. Those weren't invalid just because it turned out the world didn't work exactly as he'd thought it did. No, he had to gather more information and start over. Or not even that, just adapt to what he now knew.

Which led to his conclusion. There was no point in chasing ghosts. He would make decisions based on what he found, on what evidence he could see. So until they had actually captured Kira—and of course they would—he wouldn't speculate on the exact nature of Kira's powers. Or not with his investigation team, anyway. There would be more than time enough afterwards. So what could he speculate about?

First, he had to be careful about the word "supernatural." It obviously didn't mean anything that could actually have the property of existence; calling something supernatural is just the Mind Projection Fallacy. There was no such thing as "beyond scientific explanation" because looking at a thing and giving it a name was part of the scientific method. It was confusing your lack of understanding with some property of the world itself. But it was, nonetheless, good to make the other investigators think something along those lines was at work to get them properly scared. Sufficiently advanced technology doesn't sound nearly as frightening to the human mind as simple magic, so he'd behave as if it was magic, and that indeed summarized nicely his state of information about the thing - or his lack thereof.

If Kira was a supernatural creature, it was a supernatural creature that had evaded detection for the entirety of human history. Although… Well, maybe just recent human history. Legends abounded with supernatural creatures, it was very possible Kira was one of them. Just not very plausible. The one Kira was most likely to be would be some sort of god of death. Even if that was true, they still didn't have any evidence that favored any particular god of death of any particular culture over all gods of death of all other cultures—or even all possible gods of death. Well, a case could be made for Japanese gods of death, given that it was happening in Japan after all, but it was still not that much evidence. So the prior was distributed all over that space of potential supernatural creatures. Not to mention that one didn't simply stumble upon most of those creatures. And it was a simple fact that if this hypothesis ensemble was true, this creature had had a mighty easy time disappearing from sight as soon as humanity started getting a little bit smarter about the world. L usually had a very high opinion of his own skills but that was also because he had ample evidence of them. What he did not have was evidence that he could actually find a supernatural creature. Humans were easy because for one he knew that they actually existed. So, no, he didn't have any confidence in his ability to actually find a mysterious supernatural creature just like that.

And obviously the fact that this supernatural creature had started having visible effects upon the world changed his estimate positively, but he still wasn't confident at all.

That having been reasoned, he also didn't actually think Kira was a supernatural creature for aforementioned reasons. The simplest model was the most likely to be true, and in this case further evidence had only worked to confirm it. Kira was human.

Or Kira was a supernatural creature that was playing at a level above L's by successfully pretending to be a human male student killing for righteousness. But that hypothesis still got a complexity penalty and had a very low prior to begin with because of all the reasons already taken into account. L's current best model was that Kira was indeed human.

He had unconsciously eaten three more slices of cake as he thought and was about to grab another one when he realized there was no more cake. He sighed and pressed a small button on a radio asking someone to bring him more sweets. This time no chocolate.

He resumed his thinking.

In addition to the ontological nature of the killer, there was also the ontological nature of his tool. It allowed Kira those unbelievable powers. How had Kira come about it? What was it? How did it work? Was it some object, something he had found, or was it some power, some psychic ability? It suggested something fundamentally strange. Basically you could kill someone whose name and face you knew. At least, that's what it looked like; it was possible you needed only name or only face and Kira was misleading them, and that didn't have as low a prior because L was sure Kira was capable of that kind of ruse. It was even… plausible, it had a certain style to it you couldn't help but associate with the person who had sent those strange videos a couple of weeks ago. But he didn't have any evidence that favored that hypothesis, so it'd just be an alternative.

And this all still suggested that maybe he'd been wrong about the ontological nature of nature itself. Maybe mind had a more ontologically basic status than they'd previously thought. Maybe, maybe, maybe… all of those maybes…

He caught something with his eyes and clicked on the little screen that had drawn his attention, the screen expanded to fill his monitor, what was it, he could almost see it, what was important there…

A knock on his door disrupted his thoughts and he turned to see it opening and his butler entering with a silver tray. The butler laid it on the floor beside L, took the dirty little plates from the detective's other side, and then left without a word. L's eyes had followed the man throughout the event, having activated a computer lock as soon as he'd heard the knock, but then he unlocked it and stared at the document again. It was no use—he'd lost it.

He sighed once more, grabbed a piece of whatever it was - blueberry muffin - and grabbed a bite, staring at the monitor, which once again contained the 16 little areas.

* * *

 _5:00PM. Somewhere in Japan._

Amane Misa was idly browsing pictures of funny cats on her bright pink laptop with a lit-up skull on its cover, just like the apples on the back of certain Mac laptops, when she heard the TV announcement of Kira's Kingdom coming from the living room.

"Eeeeeh?! Already?!" She quickly closed the computer, tucked it under her arm, skipped to the couch in front of the giant screen showing Demegawa's bellowing laughter, and flopped herself onto it.

"HHHHHEEEELLLLOOOOO, JAPAN!"

* * *

11:38AM. January 16, 2004.

"Come oooonnnnnn, it's Friday! I want to go do something fun!" she pouted to her manager, who was holding the bridge of his nose and looking at the sky.

"No! This is a giant break in Misa-Misa's career and she will not—"

"But pleeeeeeease?!" She looked at him with what could only be described as a combination of Sharingan and puppy dog eyes in overall effectiveness, but he was used to her occasional tantrum, even if he couldn't help being affected a little bit by that.

"No! Let's go, we have a contract to sign!" She puffed her cheeks and then he said, "...but fine, you're free tonight, I'll reschedule your photo shoot." He massaged his temples as he heard her squee and clap. _The things I have to put up with…_

* * *

 _9:00AM. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

The room was filled with strangers, but the ones present weren't actually all the teams. They were, rather, just the heads of each team plus a small group of officers.

"We now all possess the same data," Klein started. "We all know what the most likely profile of the killer is, details about his M.O. and his times of activity. We will keep investigating along those lines. But now we have more help than ever."

"Indeed," Watari continued. "Chief Yagami will lead the field teams, but now our online capabilities are much greater. We will attempt to find Kira through his internet usage. It is very likely that he uses the computer as his main source of information, and although we did a preliminary check along those lines, we now have agencies such as the NSA—" He gestured towards a small group, who acknowledged his mention with a nod. "—helping us with it.

"Kira has covered his tracks quite well, which is yet another point of data for his profile as an intelligent agent—he has to be capable of such feats on a computer—but with some luck, there will be weaknesses in his defenses. I will let the coordinator of the NSA team explain our steps."

* * *

 _4:00PM. Yagami Household, Tokyo, Japan._

Light hadn't slept that night. He'd spent it tossing and turning and trying, but his brain was working full time. At one point, he sat up and whispered, "Ryuk?"

"Yes?" came the immediate reply, and Light remembered shinigami don't need to sleep, even though they are capable of it.

"I was thinking. Is it possible that this person… is a shinigami? Or someone with a shinigami who told them about me, or…" He didn't mention the Death Note out loud, of course. No reason to make the Mysterious Hacker know more than strictly necessary.

"No..." Ryuk answered, "because shinigami aren't allowed in the human world unless they're haunting someone with a Death Note." Haunting, what a curious word for it. "And even then, they can only talk to the owner of the Death Note. And shinigami aren't allowed to tell their humans about other Death Note owners," Well, so much for that. "…but there is another way."

"Oh?"

"Humans with the Eyes of the Shinigami can see the full name and time of death of other humans. But they can't see the time of death of other death note owners."

 _Huh. Interesting._ "Why?"

"Once a human has a death note, they're no longer victims of the death note, they're killers. The only death note that can get to them is the death note of their shinigami."

Light blinked twice at that. "This is fascinating. But we can still be killed by, say, a knife or a bullet."

"Yes but if that happens, it means that it was their time of death anyway," Ryuk explained.

"So… possessing a shinigami grants me protection from other shinigami… That is very interesting information. And you say shinigami aren't allowed to tell their humans about others?"

"Yes. We can see each other, but you wouldn't be able to see their shinigami, for example, until you touched the other human's death note. But if you had the Eyes of the Shinigami and you looked at someone who did possess a Death Note, you'd know them."

"I see. Thank you." He could see the obvious flaw in the hypothesis: the person would have had to not only see him somehow, but also figure out his electronic signature in spite of his precautions. Not easy by any account. And this information didn't help him sleep at all.

In the morning, he told his mother he wasn't feeling well, and the bags under his eyes and paleness confirmed his lack of health. He eventually managed to get some sleep in the morning, but was nevertheless feeling bad when he went downstairs to have lunch, still wearing his pajamas. His mother commented that it was probably just a side effect of his nervousness, given that his University entry exam was on the day after, and all that.

When he heard that he froze in place, his _hashi_ halfway up to his mouth. After yesterday's affair with the Mysterious Hacker, he'd completely forgotten the exam was on the following day. He spent the rest of the meal cursing internally, then excused himself and returned to his room. He attempted to study, but failed at it and decided to just lie in bed waiting.

And thinking. Always thinking.

At exactly 4PM, he dragged himself out of bed and booted his special system for killing. He filled the two next days with deaths, knowing that he wouldn't be able to do his duty while he was taking the exam. His body was in a state such that it took half an hour to accomplish that.

And the Mysterious Hacker still hadn't shown up.

At 4:55PM, while he waited expectantly, an empty text document showed up and he received a new message: "Hello again. Miss me?"

His tense body jolted with surprise and he immediately grabbed pencil and paper to start jotting down everything the Mysterious Hacker said. "No. The most important thing I need to know is how you found me and how I can stop it from happening again," he finally typed.

"Riiiight… So, about that. I have to say I was a little bit mean yesterday, and maybe trying to sound smart. Your protections aren't that bad. But I am that good. And I did all of that without help from any… governmental scum to boot. Of course, said governmental scum is going to step it up and start hunting you seriously after that stunt with threatening the world's political stability."

Once again he wrote everything down as it was being typed, using quick strokes to get the general idea. That still delayed his response, but not by much. He was sure the Mysterious Hacker would notice it, and wondered what they'd conclude. "Would you stop going around in circles whenever I ask you a question? I want to know how you found me and how I can stop it from happening again!"

"Don't you remember? I told you I wasn't sure if I wanted to help you." Light tried interrupting them but while they were typing he couldn't control his computer. That was incredibly frustrating.

"That's a bluff and you know it. If you wanted me to get caught, I would be under quite a lot of investigation already. So stop playing games and just tell me."

"I'm still not sure…"

Light realized they were playing with him. "Please? Pretty, pretty please?"

He waited for ten seconds before trying to type again but he couldn't, and soon a new message appeared: "Okay."

"Good. So, how did you find me?"

"I'm not going to tell you, at least not directly like this. You're very smart. I'm quite sure you can come up with a satisfactory answer, unlike our delightful governments."

He was left gaping at that, and then realized the words had stopped, so he typed, "What?!"

"Have you actually stopped to look for solutions? Make an actual effort? Put yourself in my place. You need to make a desperate effort to actually find a mysterious killer. You also happen to know a lot about computers. What do you do? How do you solve this problem? Feel free to start writing your stream of thought here, I heard that helps. Oh, and I'll give you a hint: it was before you'd started using your read-only system, so I guess now you're considerably more protected than before, if not yet perfectly so."

Light was… the best word he could think of was 'flabbergasted'. He was once more faintly aware of Ryuk chuckling on the background, but that wasn't important. Mysterious Hacker didn't want to talk to Ryuk, so Ryuk was an NPC. In fact, Light saw the shinigami as an NPC in general so that wasn't too different. Still, he needed to concentrate and… make an actual effort. This person was very interesting.

"Alright. I started killing on November 29. And I got the read-only system about two or three weeks later."

"It was three," the Mysterious Hacker took control of the keyboard to say.

"Right. Three weeks later. So…" He would follow their advice and write everything. He closed his eyes and started typing. He spent several minutes thinking, he paused his typing a lot when his mind ran into a blank, but he never backspaced, never erased anything. He just thought and typed. At some point he started smiling, then grinning. He opened his eyes and stared at what he'd written.

"The basic definition of evidence is a thing which behaves differently when something is true than when it's false. So you need to have found some information during those three unprotected weeks that was either unavailable to or very hard to be found by the investigation team thus far assembled, and it had to be enough for you to pinpoint me. Although I suppose if you had narrowed it down to a specific particular list of suspects you could just observe each of them directly to determine whatever else you needed to know. I must've made it particularly easy for you when I suddenly started using a read-only system, huh? All those security precautions… Anyway, you used that information to find my computer so it couldn't have been any information from elsewhere… or… no, wait. No, what I mean is… you had to somehow track my computer right, you had to find me, my computer, and no tsomeone else's. So what is it that was in my computer that wasn't in any others? Of course, there was the document with the list of names and faces but that wouldn't be enough by a long shot, you'd need to have already found me for that to even help with anything, so maybe… It's only sensible to imagine that you found me during one of my accesses. But I used Tor back then already. And how would yo never mind I'm fairly certain it should be easy to figure out who had. No, wait. Okay so the information that really sets me apart online I guess is the fact that I access lots of news sites on the same day, and from very distinct places around the globe. So… you chose a few, you had many days for that, 21 in total from when I started, and me accessing 24 sites per day, it shouldn't be too hard. So you… you somehow… you somehow figured out some list of computes that.. had accessed all those websites? But how? I mean oh never mind you just… So tor isn't as good as I'd thought, then. That was… I accessed 24 websites per day, news sites, so you grabbed a list and somehow… found… found out who was accessing all of them, what they had in common, except they didn't have anything in common because my IP would be very distinct on each day but I guess of course Tor's protection isn't absolute."

He had made some typing mistakes, but that was only to be expected with typing with his eyes closed. He spoke out loud, then: "You found me using some vulnerability of Tor or something like that, is my guess. You somehow… somehow…" That was very hard to imagine. Tampering with all those websites? "Did you do that? Did you somehow take over all those websites? And then… use that to find me?"

There was a moment of silence and then the terminal started showing new words forming. "Very good! You're not a complete disappointment after all. Yes, I took over those news websites, a few of them anyway. You are right that Tor isn't perfect, and I did find you like this. I found your browser's fingerprint - that's one of the things you need to add to your security layers, by the way, making it so that your browser ID is not unique - and then you suddenly set up a lot of new barriers and I knew I had you."

"But that's… that's completely insane!" he exclaimed out loud again. "You're saying you, alone, took over a score of news websites and used them to launch a differential attack on me, through… whatever… mysterious failures of security of Tor." He frowned. "What are these failures of security?"

"Well, they're not failures of Tor itself," the Mysterious Hacker started typing. "They're failures of how you set Tor up. Or how you didn't. You were so confident that your measures were enough that you never took the time to learn how to up your protection. You were just playing the role of someone who didn't want to be caught, maybe even the role of someone smart and insightful that didn't want to be caught, but you didn't actually, really make your best effort to be protected. Here, let me send you a link." Then they pasted a certain link and Light clicked it. He immediately went pale. It showed a lot of information regarding his browser, with details like operating system, type of browser, installed plugins (there were none), all of that without running a single script. "See? You didn't even think to do some research, to leave your comfort zone and actually get the job done no matter what. Your goal was to be protected and anonymous, and you failed because you never even actually made an effort."

"That's not fair! I tried—"

"Tried. Oh, sure you tried. But you didn't succeed. You didn't set your goal to not being caught even by the NSA." The NSA? He hadn't even thought of that possibility… hadn't spent a single minute considering that his enemy might be that powerful… "You're smart, Light, I give you that. You're possibly even smarter than most people actually hunting you. But you're overconfident and arrogant and you believe that no one is smarter than you. Guess what? I am. And I caught you. If I was with your enemies, you would be dead." Light swallowed hard but didn't say anything. It was painfully obvious now. This person was right. He hadn't… "So I'm going to give you some tips, right, for your safety. But they'll not be enough. With your current precautions, I'd estimate you'd be found within a month. With mine, maybe there's a 50% chance you won't be caught within a year. But buddy, I'm sorry to tell you that you can't keep using the internet for that if you want to continue your crusade."

"A year," he stated, deadpan. He was feeling faint once again.

"Well, I mean, I'm sure you can find a better way to do this, right? You're smart, after all. Well, we'll talk later. And good luck! Both with not dying and with the exam tomorrow, I've heard it's pretty hard."

The document stayed open for another five seconds, then disappeared from his screen.

And it took a little while longer still for him to realize the Mysterious Hacker hadn't actually explained how they had done all of what they claimed they had.

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	8. Chapter 8

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. _Death Note_ Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scientist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 8.

* * *

 _A/N: I really need to apologise for the delay in publishing. When I estimated 2~4 weeks, I did not recall that there would be the holidays there, and those were two weeks during which I was basically internetless (and silly me edits this on google docs so no access - this has been fixed). Then I got back here and spent a week so jetlagged I could barely function. Then there were tests, and a Pattern Recognition project, and ray tracing, and… Then I got back to writing. And writing itself took a while because I couldn't make this chapter feel right. It was a hard chapter to write, there was too much going on at the same time, and it's sort of a turning point to the story. Soooo… yeah, sorry. As for the next chapter, I cannot tell, I still have a lot to get done. So you should not expect the next chapter in less than 6 weeks. Sorry :/_

* * *

 _A/N 2: Some of you have expressed disbelief at Light not having been immediately captured just by using Tor. Realistically speaking, he wouldn't have been captured for that because use of Tor is not that uncommon (I, personally, know people (plural) other than me who used Tor sometimes during High School) and considering Light in particular as deserving the attention necessary to bug his computer is privileging the hypothesis. They did not have any evidence in particular that would justify spending the necessary resources to actually figure out that Light has all the precautions he does, he didn't stand out that much from the millions of other suspects, and they couldn't afford to actually bug every single one of them in order to obtain that information. A preliminary differential search can only spend so much time and so many resources on each suspect, and Light was not suspicious enough compared to all other students to warrant the kind of resource expenditure needed to detect use of protective computational measures._

* * *

 _A/N 3: I still want as many reviews as possible ^^_

* * *

 _December 5, 2003._

Erac hey, Jackal, look at this

The IRC message popped up on the screen, followed by a link. The one called Jackal clicked it and was led to an ugly backyard conspiracy theory website that talked about mysterious heart attacks of criminals happening for the past week all over the globe. Jackal rolled their eyes and switched back to the IRC chatroom.

Jackal Erac: Right. Sure. I'll look at it later.

Erac no, this is actually serious

Erac look at the sources of the news

Erac it's been happening hourly for the past few days, always on the first minute of the hour

The messages were followed by another two links, and Jackal decided to click them out of curiosity and boredom. Those were a bit less "conspiracy theory" and had even more sources. _Huh. This is interesting._ Jackal followed them and half an hour later had dozens of browser windows open showing the news in three different languages. Mysterious deaths by heart attack, all unrepentant or otherwise brutal criminals, all on the first minute of the hour. No discernible pattern in location. It seemed that they just… dropped dead, all over the world. This is very interesting.

* * *

 _December 6, 2003._

Erac Jackal: did you see? Some investigator chick called L appeared on TV yesterday challenging the person behind those deaths

Jackal checked out the link sent, but it was in Norwegian. They looked for some other link in a language they spoke and found a reference to an L - but he was a male.

Jackal Erac: uhhhh… L is a dude

Jackal sent the link to the announcement they'd found. After a few minutes they got a reply:

Erac What! No way! It was totally a chick.

DotDotDot No, it was a dude

DotDotDot But my dude isn't the same as Jackal's dude.

Jackal smiled. Wow, this is quite interesting. And… dangerous. _I should do something about it._ A part of their brain scoffed at the idea, but the rest of them just shrugged and thought that they could do it.

Jackal Erac: Do you think you can help me find patterns in these deaths?

Erac Jackal: You kidding? Of course I can!

Jackal grabbed their mobile phone and dialed someone. "Hey. I'm gonna need a break for a while. Think you can keep them off my back?"

"What? Why? How long?"

"A few weeks, maybe a month."

"WHAT?! ARE YOU INSANE?! WE DON'T HAVE—"

"Thanks, I knew I could count on you," Jackal said and hung up. Good, now that that had been taken care of they could concentrate on this. Much more interesting than their silly day job…

Jackal started working.

* * *

 _December 8, 2003._

Twenty-four deaths per day, starting November 29. That meant 216 dead criminals thus far. This was a lot of information. And the only thing all dead criminals absolutely had in common was the fact that they had either killed or severely hurt (physically or otherwise) someone in a repeated or calculated manner. So the killer wasn't just punishing criminals in general, but rather a very specific type of criminal. A criminal - one could say - that would never be cured, that did it because they were insane or took pleasure in hurting others or were unrepentant.

Jackal could see the sense in that, if you had no hope for humanity. If you really believed that the world was better without some people. There was something in it… but Jackal didn't believe it for one second. It was too sad to imagine that humanity would never get past these little roadblocks. No, humanity would do better and get free from its mortal shackles, grow beyond the presence of random glitches in some people's brains.

So that was the killer's M.O. This type of criminal, hourly. There was no indication of privileged place, the locations were randomly selected, but every single criminal's info had been available online before their death. And the only thing that all of their online appearances had in common was the presence of name and description of crime; furthermore, other than some of the criminals that had appeared on TV pretending to be L, all had had a face attached to the name. Thus far, the best bet was that the killer needed at least the name of their victim to murder, and possibly their face, too.

Jackal had spent over 33 of the preceding 48 hours on the computer looking and cross-referencing and researching. They had found a few news websites that had made available the details of a large part of the dead criminals, but that wouldn't be enough. Jackal needed more information.

* * *

 _December 15, 2003._

Three hundred and eighty deaths recorded thus far. The largest cities in the world were representative of the locations, and that was only to be expected. Jackal already had some idea of what websites were used the most frequently by this killer, plus suspected some that had also been used a few times.

Subjectively, they didn't feel too confident. But that was just symptomatic of how inefficient human brains were; Jackal had studied information and probability theory and knew exactly how confident they should be in their guesses. Well, not exactly. They kicked themself for thinking that. Still, they had actually done the math, so unless Bayes' Theorem was wrong, they weren't. Probably. Anyway, it was time to act.

Jackal Erac, DotDotDot, Numia: I need to ask you all a favour. And it's going to be big.

* * *

 _December 17, 2003._

Silently, without anyone noticing, Jackal took over a few news websites.

It hadn't been particularly easy, but not particularly hard either. It'd been mostly risky. If anyone found them, well, they'd have some trouble with the governments of the world. But it was worth it. This… this killer, whoever they were, was a threat to Jackal's plans. They were disturbing the stability of the world. This would not end well unless Jackal intervened.

Jackal now owed a few powerful people a few ridiculously large favors. But it was worth it. It was all worth it.

* * *

 _December 21, 2003._

After taking over the news sites, it had all been laughably easy. I mean, who the hell would visit a website from Budapest followed by one from Argentina? And this killer… well, that he hadn't left himself completely open to being found was the best Jackal could have said about his defenses. Browser fingerprinting, that's how Jackal did it. They had been preparing for having to work much harder than that. Oh boy. Time to watch.

* * *

 _5:22PM. January 17, 2004. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

Light got home from the exam feeling profoundly exhausted, both physically and mentally. He hadn't slept well on the previous night, again, and not because of university. He tossed and turned, the words he'd read and said swimming through his mind, hovering just behind his eyelids and daunting him. He felt glad he'd already written the following day's deaths; it was one less thing to worry about.

As soon as he turned on his computer he checked his emails, and a specific one from a very weird address was on the top of the unread list. His spam filter should've blocked griuannb1728aouqpus09 , but for some reason it hadn't, and he clicked it with dread, knowing what he'd find.

"Turn your other system on," it said simply, and as soon as he'd read it the email vanished from his inbox. He checked the trash and it wasn't there either. Of course. He sighed heavily and felt Ryuk's presence looking over his shoulder but didn't turn, didn't say a word. He just turned his other system on to have another cryptic conversation. At least the Mysterious Hacker had promised to teach him how to protect himself better for a year. One year…

* * *

 _3:52PM. January 19, 2004._

Light had spent the past two days mulling over his information, over what the Mysterious Hacker had said. He was… he was being careless. He'd been careless all along, and it was only a stroke of luck or a consequence of how disorganized the world's governments were that saved him from suffering a fate similar to what he had inflicted on countless criminals. He was idly browsing news websites, looking for more of them, while his mind worked on the problem at hand.

 _You do realize that we need to stop_ , Caution said.

 _No, we don't! We just need to be more careful, and maybe find a new source of information. Or… maybe…_ Death trailed off.

 _Maybe?_

 _Well. You know. The fans. What if we manipulated them so that they provided us with the necessary information? Not us specifically, but just… publish it. Make the world our eyes._

 _That… sounds like it could go very wrong_ , warned Common Sense. _Too many loose variables, I'd think…_

 _We'll store this idea and think about it some more later_ , mediated Practical.

 _But I stand by myself_ , Caution insisted. _I think we need to stop and think. Mysterious Hacker said that they estimate that even with their protections we won't last a year. Now the NSA is on our trail and we can only imagine that the investigation will become even stronger and more dangerous. I'd love to say I don't want to say it, but I do, I really do, so I'll say it: I told you so._

 _He has a point_ , said Common Sense. _We have gathered too much evidence already, there is only one sensible, rational choice now. Unless we want to die pretty soon, we really should stop and rethink our strategies._

 _It's not that bad! We don't even know for sure that the NSA is after us! The US government said they had backed down, and we could still get the Eyes..._

 _What?_ This time it was the central Light, the one overseeing his own thoughts, that interrupted. He was looking at a webpage,  Kira Revealed. It was a page dedicated not to actually reveal his identity but to show… to show…

* * *

 _January 16, 2014. Chief Yagami's office, Tokyo, Japan._

"You're one of our brightest investigators," the distorted voice of L said as soon as Watari and investigator Silva were seated in a private room. "You're capable, intelligent, quick on the uptake, willing to go the extra mile… and more than that, you're driven." She was completely red now, but was looking directly at Watari nonetheless. She believed one should receive praise with pride instead of modesty and embarrassment. "And that comes to my question: why? What makes you tick? Why are you so intent on this? You know this is dangerous. You know this is a risk to your life. In fact, it's even likely that you'll die here."

Watari frowned invisibly. This wasn't the first investigator L had picked to talk personally to. L had been doing that to each and every one of them, trying to scare them off, to make them quit. They needed people who would really go the extra mile, here. But Watari felt investigator Silva was almost certainly one of the good ones. She was going to stay.

"So tell me, investigator Silva. Why?"

"Because Kira murdered my brother a week before he was proven innocent of his crimes," she replied somewhat coolly, the heat having drained from her cheeks as soon as L had started asking the questions. "Because Kira is not a savior, he is a murderer who took the life of an innocent man and who knows how many others. Because Kira is not Justice, Kira is a cancer on humanity. Kira is just human, and makes human mistakes, and is making other people pay for things they don't deserve. Kira is evil."

* * *

 _3:59PM. January 19, 2004. Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

Light's breath caught in his throat. _What…_ He scrolled down and clicked the links. He read the pages he was redirected to, article after article, each about one of his victims. As he did that, his vision started swimming and his mind started shattering; not breaking, shattering, shards of his mind separating. He'd have called this the cognitive effect of polarization if his inner dialogue was comprised of actual people.

 _I told you I told you I told you_ , said Caution, _something like this was going to happen. Obviously-_

 _No, don't be silly. That's a ploy_ , explained Death. _We have enemies everywhere. Of course there are websites denouncing the "failures" of Kira and how "evil" he is. Everything worthy of attention draws all kinds of it, good and bad, and you always knew it! This is no worse than anything before._

Common Sense chimed in: _Are you sure? Because… really, we never did do any research._ As he thought it, Light's hands were already doing exactly that, looking for more information, more trustworthy websites. _I mean, sure, we kinda checked the background and stuff b-b-b-b-but…_

Light noticed his thought processes were kinda stilted. He kept researching. He had to. Tunnel vision, tunnel vision, how had he missed something like this…

 _—but we know, we've always known that innocent people sometimes get convicted._

 _Sometimes?_ scoffed Caution, _Try **all the time**. That's one of the reasons we stepped in in the first place, because the justice system is corrupted and weak. It doesn't- doesn't- doesn't-_

Click. Hurt. Click. Hurt. Look. Pain. Read. Loathing. The New York Times: Famous Case of Innocent Convict Killed by Lord Death. Click. Keep clicking. Keep reading. Don't stop reading. One person. Exactly one person who was later proven innocent died of a heart attack at the start of the hour before that could have happened. One innocent person, one whose death served no other purpose, one light erased from the world. That was...

 _That's okay! We're allowed to make mistakes sometimes! There aren't even that many, and it's all for the greater good. They're collateral damage, we're good, we're doing the right thing._

He cracked.

 _We kill 24 people per day, we've been doing this for almost two months_ , Common Sense pointed out. _Of course we will make mistakes, it's only natural…_

 _Excuse me? They're not just mistakes_ , Caution expanded. Caution expanded. Caution grew. Caution, Caution became Moral again, reverted back to the voice of what was Right and Wrong, doubled, tripled in size. The rest of Light's mind didn't hold a candle to that, to the guilt, to the searing blaze of fury and shame and fear and… _Those_ , Moral/Caution/Guilt continued, _those are people. They are people we killed. And they are people who were not guilty. They are people who were convicted wrongly; they are people who had accidents; they are people that made the world brighter. They are people without whom the world is not a better place. One person. Even if it's only one person. A single person wrongly convicted, a single person who died and needn't have died. One. But no. Not one._

 _Wrong, wrong, wrong, that's just wrong, I'm wrong, this is wrong, why, why, this shouldn't have happened, shouldn't be happening, shouldn't, shouldn't_ , Light got up awkwardly from his chair, stumbled and almost fell, _dizzy, dizzy, minds, people, death, innocence,_ he walked to his bed, he crawled to his bed, he fell in front of his bed, _Ryuk was laughing, what was Ryuk laughing at?_ , Light fell, his head was on his bed but he was kneeling before it and he climbed it, he crawled to it, he cried, he knew he was crying, _why is Ryuk laughing I'm going to kill him no I can't kill anymore this cannot happen can't can't_ , he felt the tears down his face, he could see the faces, he could almost hear the voices, he didn't know their names.

He didn't know their names.

How dare he not know their names.

He opened his eyes, or maybe they were already open and he just realized it, but he staggered back to the computer. He reopened all those websites showing all those people. The innocents. The false positives. The people he'd killed who weren't criminals, the ones wrongly convicted.

Annabelle Florent. Kawakami Junko. Pedro Silva. Haley Bright. Cyril Baskov. Fernando Ferrera. Johann Krause. More, many more.

Many, many more.

He couldn't read anymore, why couldn't he read anymore?

Oh, because there was water in front of his eyes. Stupid water. It was, was, was, was getting in the way. They… they deserved to be known. He deserved to suffer for them.

How? How had that happened? What had led him to be so careless, so, so, so irrational?

Death. That was the name he'd given to that part of himself. Why?

And in a moment of clarity, it happened. Light recognized who that part of him was, what it was, why it acted the way it did.

 _I know you_ , Moral/Caution/Guilt said. _You're not death, or curiosity, or the part of us that wants to empirically test things. You're that part… you're that corruption of our brain, that part of us that got power and was thrilled by it, that part of us that couldn't wait to actually have control over other people. I should've seen it, should've known it, should've should've should've…_

And that was the realization that broke it, that was the point when Death no longer had a voice. Light no longer needed it, no longer wanted it, no longer listened to it. The only parts of him that he wanted arguing about his decisions were the parts aligned with himself, with his desires and his motivations, and an evolutionarily selected module that does things "for the good of the tribe" was not part of it. It was obvious in hindsight, clear that these desires for control were just that, just the neural circuitry that got activated once he got to be on top and that guaranteed his offspring would stay on top.

His vision was still swimming, still not straight, still not right, still, still, still. He could think, yes, he was thinking, complete words, complete thoughts, yes, that was good. He wasn't totally lost, no, not completely, no. Not not not-

This technique was useful, identifying one's conflicting desires and ideas, grouping them and naming them, letting them fight it out. But it was strictly controlled from within, it was no more than a self-hack to make it easier to think. His mind… it had been rearranged by that. It no longer had space for any of those four main persistent personas, because each of them only existed to complement the others. In the vacuum left by the one he called Death…

Pain pain pain how could he innocent people he had killed innocent people but he knew it, he'd always known it, always, in the back of his mind. He had known it when he threatened those police officers and news casters, he had known it when he imagined everyone in Sakura TV's building dead and it would've been his fault and he didn't catch himself he felt nothing it was wrong wrong wrong—

Light changed his mind.

Shaking his head, nodding, yes, changed his mind. Yes. Yes, he had changed his mind. How much evidence did it take to change one's mind? The Myste- Myste- Mysterious Hacker, they hadn't been enough. They they they they weren't, hadn't, couldn't- He hadn't seen the scope. He hadn't really updated. From the core, from everything, he hadn't really thought about it. He'd just pretended to take that information into account, the fact that MH had found him so easily, that everyone was after him, he had just pretended and then moved on and done all the same things, not changing his plans… not one bit.

Light changed his plans.

It was obvious, now. In hindsight, it had always been obvious. He paid lip service to the idea that one shouldn't trust one's own rationality, one's own brain. Sure, he said he believed it, he claimed he was taking the necessary steps, but really? He didn't, and he wasn't. He hadn't. He'd been stupid and naïve and irrational, he'd been letting his primal instincts drive him, control his actions. And it was obvious now that his plan… it was too small.

It was too small, just small enough to fit in a human brain. _It doesn't fit us. It's not enough for us. We're larger than that, better than this petty plan._ That was his Ambition talking, the first to rise after Death's death. _Killing criminals? Cute, but obvious, simple and with very little chance of making the world any better. Too many risk factors, too much attention-seeking. We said we didn't want power. Well, we changed our mind. We are the only ones who can wield it. We are going to do the next thing. We are going to take over the world. This time it will not be some primal instinct that will try to seize control at every turn, to know power. This time it will be us, it will be planned, it will be carefully built, and it will be optimal._

From the corpses of Practical and Common Sense rose Analysis, who asked the obvious question. _How?_

And outside Light's mind, the world saw the coldest smile his face had yet produced, framed by the streaming tears on his cheeks like a wicked photograph of resolution and madness.

* * *

 _11:08AM. January 21, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan._

An investigator from Team Alpha hurried to Yagami's desk. "Yagami-sama, we have a situation. A very, very disturbing situation."

"What is it?"

"Kira has… stopped killing."

Silent spread in ripples through the room. "Please state what you know in detail," Watari asked.

"The last registered regular criminal heart attack happened yesterday at 11AM. Since then, the pattern has simply ceased. We waited 24 hours before notifying you, but it appears we have been a full day without a single reported hourly heart attack."

By then no one was talking anymore. Just cold silence. L's distorted voice broke it: "We will keep investigating as before. Nothing has changed. We still need to wait before we draw any conclusions."

* * *

 _January 28, 2004. Somewhere in Japan._

"Eeeehhh?! Kira is gone?!" Amane Misa was in a small cheap restaurant, counting on a dark wig, heavy makeup, decorative glasses and colored contact lenses to disguise her identity. She noticed the sudden hush following that and realized she had not only shouted, but was also standing up and staring at the TV showing the news.

And it took exactly two seconds for someone to recognize her.

"It's Misa Misa!" a teenage girl exclaimed, and suddenly Misa found herself surrounded by squeals and autograph requests. She sighed, grinned and bore it for as long as it took, until they eventually cleared out. By then the news program was talking about something else, so she just focused on finishing her meal and left.

She walked home, having switched to her other disguise (because, really, it was silly to only carry one disguise with you) where she was a freckled redhead with a large hat, and mulled over that information. Kira… what happened to Kira?

* * *

 _Yagami household, Tokyo, Japan._

Light was staring at his monitor, not really using it. Ryuk was used to it, these spells of immobility that took the boy while he thought. He wasn't using his imaginary personalities there. He was fully concentrated on… thinking. Simply thinking. Because this was clearly a very delicate matter. And hard. And…

 _Who is this hacker?_

That was it, really. The most important question of right now. After all, the cat was out of the bag, wasn't it? At least one person knew who he was, possibly more. And on the whole, it hadn't been a bad thing. It had probably saved his life, at least for the time being. He had completely erased his other system, the one he'd been using to be Kira. He had gotten some tips from the hacker, and some were pretty obvious, too. Have multiple non-unique browser profiles; actually update the browser, even if it's a read-only system (old code is very dangerous, apparently); use an anonymizing local proxy; there were quite a few. But the only way MH had suggested of staying un-arrested forever would be… changing countries frequently and discarding services - even identities - as he went.

That… would be near impossible, currently.

But it was a moot point. He was no longer thinking about just killing a bunch of criminals. That was… he wouldn't say "beneath" his abilities, but something along those lines. He needed to think bigger. And he'd been subtly manipulating his horde of fans into leaking more information on his fansites. It would all be okay. He hoped.

But to the problem at hand. Who was this hacker? This person who knew him… and how could he find them?

Well, how did they find him?

Differential attack. He'd been accessing many news sites using a single browser, 24 times a day. So they…

…took over those news sites…

…something that was highly illegal and could be quickly used to find them…

No, there had to be a flaw in the plan somewhere. It couldn't be that easy. Why would the hacker tell him this method of finding him if they could be found with it? Well, obviously because they didn't think they could be found. That meant that either they had covered their traces - which was a very plausible hypothesis - or…

…or they believed Light would not try to rat them out.

Going down that worst-case scenario, why would Light not—

Of course.

The hacker had weeks of blackmail material. Recordings of him talking to Ryuk—which would likely be interpreted as the ramblings of a madman at first, but a madman who at least thought he was Kira—, the text conversations between them, the access logs… Light's forehead thumped against his desk. And he had nothing. This wasn't fair. This type of situation, it shouldn't be lopsided like this. He should have some sort of blackmail material on the hacker, too. Ideally, their identity. But… of course it wouldn't be that easy. The hacker knew that if Kira found out who he was, Kira would kill them. That much was painfully obvious.

So the situation in fact had an odd sort of balance. The hacker hadn't ratted him out yet, probably because they'd also face penalties for confessing to all the work they had gone through and because they wanted something from him. The hacker would only turn him in if he was threatening the hacker's life. And he would kill them as soon as he found out who they were.

Well, the approach was always the same: differential analyses. Try to use what information he had about the hacker as evidence. And… he'd probably need to start learning more about information security and hacker culture.

Kira spent a month without killing anyone, without making any announcements, without showing any evidence of his existence. His followers were growing increasingly restless and felt abandoned. The NSA attacks were complete failures, and the investigations by the field team increasingly useless. It looked like Kira had left just as he'd arrived: suddenly, mysteriously, without explanation or cause.

Until February 20, 2004, when five of the most wanted criminals of the USA showed up with their hands up at a police station in New York and said they had a message from their Lord Death. It was quite sudden, and they were unwilling to say anything else until they were allowed on national TV. They accepted being cuffed and secured, and just wanted to speak their message. Additionally, someone had tipped off the media about it, so an hour after the five criminals had shown up at the station, there were three different news vans in front of it.

Eventually the criminals got what they wanted.

"Our Lord Death has a message to the world."

"He has not gone. He has not disappeared. He still watches over us."

"He has said that we are facing the most peaceful age yet. Countries have never gotten along so well, crimes all over the world are at an all-time low."

"He would hate to be disappointed in us. We are capable of more. We can make the world an even better place. Crimes can disappear completely. Wars can be entirely avoided."

"Remember: our Lord Death is still watching over us. He knows, He sees, He judges."

At that moment, the five of them keeled over and died. Later analysis showed that the five had suffered heart attacks.

On the same day, the still existent fansites all received the same message, that now crime was in the people's hands. They weren't to trust the media; they were to repeat all information they obtained, spread it as much as they could. They were to help cleanse the world.

Kira's Kingdom and other similar shows received messages like that one. Kira was rallying his allies and supporters to make a stand for strength, unity and peace.

* * *

 _23:39. March 12, 2004. Somewhere in Japan._

Amane Misa was walking back home, completely alone, carrying a bag full of the results of her latest shopping trip. She took the alleys she was familiar with; those places she had visited many times throughout her life. The moon was waning and didn't illuminate much of the path, but it was enough for her to be able to see well enough. As usual she paid attention to all directions, making sure not to be taken by surprise by anyone who might be walking at that time, and so she didn't miss the suspicious movement in a side alley.

"A-anyone there?" she faked stuttering and fear, mapping the best escape routes should the need for them arise. "This is not funny!" She was aware it could be a cat or something like that, but it was better to be safe than to be sorry.

"Misa-Misa…" she heard, and a young man appeared from where she had seen the disturbance. She estimated he was around 30cm taller than herself, but not in very good shape. Indeed, he looked like the kind of person who didn't spend much time away from his computer - scrawny, wearing very large glasses, a white scruffy shirt, the typical stereotype of the 'computer nerd.' She hated that phrase. "I knew you were beautiful… But to think you are smart, too!"

"H-hey… what are you talking about…?" She took a step back as she realized he was holding a knife in his left hand.

"I've been following you since you left the store. You and I… are meant to be together! I love you, Misa-Misa!"

"Sir… I'm sorry but I don't even know you. And you're not e-exactly helping your own ch-chances with that knife, either!" Further step back.

"No! It's clear that you must be mine!" She didn't say a word and merely took another step back, dropping her bag on the floor for faster running. She already had her left hand in her pocket reaching for her mobile phone when he said, "If we can't be together here… then I'll kill you and kill myself afterwards! Then we'll be together forever!"

She didn't let him finish his sentence before she bolted, fast-dialing her manager as she did that. She had seen another side alley further back and, if she remembered correctly, it opened to a main street.

It didn't. It was a dead end.

 _Shit. Answer the phone, already._

She turned around, hoping she'd still be able to outrun him but he was already there, a manic grin on his face. "H-hey, sir… Sir, you don't want to do that! I-if you do that… I'll never forgive you! I'll never love you, even in the afterlife!"

"NO! WE—" Suddenly, he stopped. He dropped the knife, his body sagged, and turned around, walking a few steps before dropping dead on the ground. She snapped her phone shut and tiptoed to the alley she'd just left, staying as far from the body as she could, and then she ran. She did grab her bag first, but she ran as hell. What, was she going to just trust her luck that the guy who wanted to murder her decided to simply drop dead? No, sir. She'd run. And she ran.

* * *

 _March 20, 2004. Somewhere in Japan._

That was the house. Rem flew in its direction, her exoskeleton somehow being supported by… equally skeletal wings. She never even thought about it, it was just the way the world was. She held the extra death note in her left hand as she floated just outside Amane Misa's window, observing the girl that had been the death of Gelus. She seemed like an innocent and cute girl. Her room was absurdly pink with slashes of black everywhere. The decoration included many skulls and rock band posters, and even her computer was decorated like that.

Misa was doing something on it, and as Rem went through the window into her room, she stood up and left. The shinigami followed her, still undetectable to her, as she went to the basement of her house, stopping to grab a fruit in her kitchen.

She descended with a spring on her step, looking quite content and humming to herself. Rem could see how Gelus had fallen in love with her. She was… There was a certain magnetic aura about her. It wasn't just physical attractiveness; it was like she welcomed you, even if she didn't know you were there. You looked at her and couldn't help but feel a need to protect her.

Lost in these thoughts, it took Rem two seconds to take a look at the room Misa was currently occupying, and she dropped the extra death note involuntarily when she did so, paralyzed by surprise. The girl turned on her heels upon hearing the sound of the notebook that had suddenly materialized. She approached it slowly and blinked twice. It had landed face down, so all she could see was its black back cover.

She grabbed it and looked at the other side, which read Death Note. At the same time, she became capable of seeing Rem, and held her breath for five seconds, swallowing the surprise. The two of them stared at each other, until Amane Misa broke the silence.

"You must be a shinigami, then."

Somewhen, somewhere, somehow.

A particularly attentive shinigami furrowed her brows as she looked at the human world and followed a few distinct people. "That's odd…"

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	9. Chapter 9

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. _Death Note_ Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scientist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 9.

* * *

 _A/N: This short interlude is here. I've been busier than I had expected, and then had one month of depression, and, well. It was a bad semester and a full one and hopefully you won't murder me too much for my absence. To make up for it, I'll be posting a full chapter following this one. I hope you all like it! And tell me on the reviews!_

* * *

 _A/N 2: Someone commented, about chapter 5, that Light's accent or language would be noticeable via the messages sent. They would not, because it was not Light who recorded them. He instructed the people to record messages that had certain core ideas in them, but he did not write the exact phrase they were to use (they were free to word the ideas however they liked). So each message was distinct and in the appropriate language._

* * *

 _11:13PM. January 21, 2004. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

Kira has stopped killing. L repeated that sentence in his mind over and over and over again. He didn't expect this to be a fluke or a hiccup. Even though he had told the investigation team that they wouldn't come to any conclusions, it was pretty clear that Kira had definitely stopped. Temporarily? Maybe. But… Kira was… driven. He wouldn't just stop. Would he? No, that didn't… seem likely. Something had changed.

On unrelated news, the sky was blue and water was wet. He forked down some strawberry cake.

What was important to know was what exactly had changed. What would make Kira stop? Had he revealed any information accidentally? As far as Kira knew, major world governments had been in fact backing off. He couldn't have known that the investigation was still ongoing.

Ah, right. L had forgotten. Kira was smart. Well, somewhat, anyway. But certainly Kira wouldn't buy it. The governments simply casually stopping their hunt? That's not how politicians work, that'd not be how the United States of America would react, not being as horribly trigger-happy as they tended to be. Especially not with their current administration. No, Kira certainly knew he was still being investigated.

He added another empty plate to the growing pile to his right and grabbed another piece of strawberry cake that had been lying there to his left. He wasn't looking at either; it was just automatic by then. He stared at the monitor, which just showed a bunch of Kira-related news, kneeling on the hard wooden floor. He didn't like chairs much.

This was not supposed to happen. In fact, if this were to follow conventional story logic, now would be the point when Kira would start getting increasingly bold, and somehow escape capture by international intelligence teams until the last minute, and then it'd be flashy and he'd have a spectacular fall… But story logic didn't rule the real world. In the real world, people were allowed to change their minds, they were allowed to obtain more information through means unknown to the hero. And the hero…

The hero should stop getting distracted by his own thoughts and get to it. What could have happened to Kira?

Another piece of cake gone.

Possibility 1: He died. Car crash, mugging gone bad, suicide because of guilt (L snorted as he thought of that), house fire… Would Kira have enough forethought to guarantee the continuation of his legacy should such an event befall him? L thought it unlikely. Who would Kira trust to carry his torch?

Possibility 2: He repented, was overcome with guilt, some variation of that. Very unlikely scenario.

Possibility 3: He realized how precarious his situation was and decided to make a temporary pause, possibly for quite a while, take a breather. That was… actually quite likely. The likeliest of the three, anyway.

Were there any other possibilities? Of course there were. But were they relevant enough to be added to the list? Why else would he have stopped? Assuming he was alive, that'd mean he had decided the optimal move was to stop, either temporarily or permanently. Moral problems or pragmatic problems were the ones covered by possibilities 2 and 3.

He chewed some more and added another possibility to the list, one he found himself all too often failing to consider.

Possibility 4: His power had failed him.

How? It wasn't important. Without knowing how that power worked, he would be grasping at straws here. That was the main reason why he found himself so often not considering this. He didn't in fact know the extent of Kira's powers. It seemed to have a lot of constraints built into it, but it was in fact quite possible that those constraints were Kira's psychological quirks rather than natural ones.

But having something so ridiculously powerful that he'd had to label it magic… it escaped grasp, escaped imagination, exactly because there was too much he could imagine inside the black box that was Kira's power. And speculating about it, about all the possible caveats… really, it would just slow him down, and it wouldn't help at all. He had to work with the knowledge he did have, and inventing wild hypotheses about what Kira could conceivably do wouldn't be efficient, and it was so unlikely he'd get it right that it just wasn't worth the trouble. Still, he had to take it into account, and think about how he should act...

And then L froze. There was yet another quite terrifying possibility.

Possibility 5: Someone else had found him.

What if he hadn't stopped of his own volition? What if someone else had made him stop? What if they were blackmailing him? What if he'd been captured by one government or another, and his power was being harnessed?

He gulped down the rest of his piece of cake, set it aside, and didn't pick another piece. He realized his thoughts had locked into place, and he was starting to break a cold sweat. This… he should've thought of this immediately. This changed everything.

* * *

 _Somewhere in Japan._

"Kira has stopped killing."

A chill ran down investigator Silva's spine when she heard that. She hadn't been in the HQ for the first announcement; she'd been in the field, tailing someone. She received the message on the special mobile she used exclusively for this investigation.

"Investigations will proceed as usual," came the next message. She didn't see it until five minutes later, because she'd been paying attention to her target.

* * *

 _January 28, 2004. Kira Taskforce Team Gamma Headquarters._

It'd been a week since Kira had stopped. That was the deadline L had set before they announced his disappearance publicly. The week was… difficult at best. People were very confused and aimless. They didn't know what to do, there was no more incoming data. Kira had effectively stopped and there wasn't much they could do about it.

* * *

 _8:02AM. February 4, 2004._

"L has officially called off all field investigations," Watari told the full room. The entire team wouldn't fit in it, of course, so his voice was being transmitted to the headquarters of teams Alpha and Beta where the remaining members were listening. "For now, we will only review the clues we already have and keep track of online movement."

Investigator Silva noticed that once again Klein wasn't in the room. She hadn't seen Klein in two weeks.

* * *

"Misa-Misa looks fabulous in that dress!"

* * *

 _February 20, 2004. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

L put another sugar cube in his coffee and sipped from it. Two more sugar cubes. Another sip. One more sugar cube. Ah, yes, now it was good. He regarded the news recording with attention, trying to grab details that might have escaped. The announcement was over, the news station moved to some other unimportant thing, blah, blah, blah. Next channel. Oh, no more channels. He went back to the first one and started watching the recording again. He didn't think he'd learn much, but it was better than doing nothing.

* * *

 _Somewhere in Japan._

Amane Misa smiled as she saw the convicted criminals announce Kira's permanence. Her smile twisted into a grimace when they died. Sure, she knew it would have to happen, otherwise Kira couldn't control them, but that didn't mean she liked it.

* * *

 _February 21, 2004. A dark room with a bright monitor somewhere._

After having spent the good part of the previous night reviewing the tapes, L still wasn't sure of a great many things. He knew that, for one, either Kira was indeed still alive or he had given his powers to someone else, and L thought the former was more plausible. And he also suspected very strongly that Kira had in fact guessed that the investigation was still ongoing.

But had he been captured? Was Kira now under some government's control? That would also explain it, all of it. Kira had been captured and was being made to use his power, or maybe the power had been taken from him. As usual, not knowing the nature of it constrained the making of decisions and drawing conclusions on that front.

 _What do I know?_ He reached back into the deepest recesses of his mind, scraping every bit of information he had on that case. _Kira is smart, but somewhat reckless. Probably in his early or mid-twenties, probably educated, probably highly idealistic, probably male, and the conjunction of these characteristics is itself not highly probable. He's probably Japanese, but we don't know exactly where in Japan he is, and it's possible he may have relocated already. Unlikely, given the measures we took against that, but possible nonetheless._

 _Kira has definitely paused, but maybe… maybe not completely. Perhaps he will try to kill only a few people. Perhaps he believes the world is pretty good already and he doesn't need to keep pushing it. Perhaps that's all true but the real reason he stopped was because he thought he'd be caught otherwise. Perhaps he really did die. Perhaps his power is gone. Too many perhapses._

 _I need to think further about this._

* * *

Somewhen, somewhere, somehow.

A few shinigami had noticed, but not many. The change hadn't yet spread much. Only a few individuals… but still, that was grave enough to be taken to the shinigami king. Especially when someone tried to kill one of the affected humans, and instead of the human dying, the shinigami suddenly turned to dust.

* * *

nightelf37: See ya on Third!


	10. Chapter 10

nightelf37: Remember, all Author's Notes below belong to Scientist's Thesis. They're not mine.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing here. _Death Note_ Is by Tsugumi Ohba, and this fic belongs to Scientist's Thesis/Pedro. Here's chapter 10, the last that he has published before deciding to rewrite it.

* * *

 _A/N: This chapter is being published immediately after the previous one, so make sure you've read it before reading this one._

* * *

 _A/N 2: So, I talk about a some quantum mechanics stuff here. For more in-depth (but still intuitive) explanations about it, check the following bit dot ly addresses:_

 _/1nLKzai_

 _/1qYHGDL_

 _For explanations about the Solomonoff prior:_

 _/1pkvPP7_

 _For explanations about dovetailers:_

 _/1nLKFyG_

* * *

 _A/N 3: Reviews! Reviews make me happy! Especially after such a long pause and long chapter and complicated concepts! I'm not sure this is the best way to explain them, but I hope it is!_

* * *

 _A/N 4: I'm not sure when I'll publish the next chapter. I can't give you deadlines, planning fallacy will take care of me not respecting them. Sorry! But I am still working on this fic!_

* * *

 _March 20, 2004. Amane Household. Tokyo, Japan._

"You must be a shinigami, then."

Rem stared in silence, not blinking, just taking in the scene before her. After a while, she said, "...yes, very perspicacious of you." She paused, not sure what to say next, and the girl just smiled expectantly. "I was expecting you to faint or scream," she continued.

"Yes, I'm sure most people do that," Misa said, "but I'm not most people." She lowered her eyes to the black notebook and opened it. Blank pages. Nothing written on any of them. She looked up at the shinigami again. "What's this?" she asked, even though she already had a working hypothesis that implied someone had lied to her.

"It's a death note. It's a notebook where you write the names of people, and then those people die."

Misa saw Rem's facial expression change—no, not really, it didn't look like her face could actually change, but she still had this very weird feeling of an expression behind that frozen mask—and realized her cheeks were starting to hurt with the huge grin that was stretching her face.

Rem just stared at her, feeling uneasy. She couldn't tell why, couldn't put a finger on what it was about that smile stretching the girl's face that made it so terrifying. It wasn't something she'd ever seen, not really. It wasn't the usual smile of desire for power, the deranged expression of someone who just figured out the best way of crushing their enemies. No, this was… it was a smile of dawning realization, of far-reaching thoughts. Haloed by the eerie light of a dozen monitors behind her, her eyes closed, Misa looked like she had just understood. What she had understood wasn't relevant; the only important part was that she now knew more than you.

"This is remarkable," Misa finally said, after properly updating. "How exactly does it work?" She skipped back to her chair and spun twice, holding her notebook in front of her face.

Rem floated after her and mused. _Two minutes ago, this girl smiled one of the most terrifying smiles I have ever seen, and now she's spinning on her chair like a child._ The shinigami smiled, and somehow Misa noticed, even though her actual face was still as stone.

"What are you smiiiling aaaat?" she asked with a smirk.

"It's nothing. The notebook… you write a person's name on it, with their face in mind so you know it's the right person. If a cause of death is not written on it in 40 seconds, the person will die of a heart attack. If it is, you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to write further details."

Misa took in the sight of her with particular care as she explained. The shinigami's body was somewhat skeletal, but not as if it lacked flesh; rather, it was as if human bones were encasing her insides. The only skin visible was from where her neck and head escaped the exoskeleton; she wore purple lipstick and had her right eye covered by a bandage, the other being yellow and catlike. The white bat wings she had been sporting were no longer visible, but they were probably purely cosmetic, as the shinigami still floated.

She thought about it for a second. "So that's how it is… And you don't have some sort of key or anything binding you to me, do you?"

"Ah… well, nothing physical, but I am bound to you as the shinigami who gave you the death note. Only you can see me or hear me, and I will be with you until you give your death note up or die. If you give it up after using it, you'll forget everything about it. Oh, and anyone who touches it will also be able to see me."

After using it. Interesting. "Can I see other shinigami, too?" she asked immediately.

This girl is smart. "Only if you touch their death note."

"Kira. He's with a shinigami too, isn't he?"

"Kira? I don't…" Before Rem could complete her sentence, Misa had already spun on her chair, opening a lot of random looking links on her myriad computer monitors. Rem just stared, muted.

"Yagami Light, internationally known as Kira, spent a few weeks killing one person per hour," she said as she showed relevant websites one after the other, "all of them by heart attacks. I hacked into his computer, long story, but he has a shinigami too. Name's Ryuk." She spun once more to face Rem again, and narrowed her eyes. "You're saying you didn't know that?"

"Yes, I knew it," she said, nodding and looking somewhat impressed. "I didn't know his name, but I knew that Ryuk was here and—"

"Oh. Okay!" The girl spun in her chair again, grinning slightly. Then she stopped, crossed her arms, closed her eyes and furrowed her brows, tapping the notebook against her own torso. "Why did you bring me this?" she said finally, opening her eyes.

"There was a shinigami. His name was Gelus. He… was in love with you. And he s—"

"He saved me," she concluded. "That day, in that alley. That was him, right?"

"Yes."

"Well, why isn't he giving me the death note, then?"

 _This is incomprehensible_ , Rem thought as she watched the girl giddily rock her legs. "He's dead."

The girl gasped and put both hands on her hand. "Oh, no! Why? What happened?" She stopped and put both hands on her hips, always holding the death note. "Wait. You're gods of death. I thought you couldn't die!"

"Yes, well, we can. There are two ways. The first, the normal one, is if we don't kill enough humans."

The merest twitch of an eyebrow. "You have to kill humans to live?"

"Yes. When we kill a human, their remaining lifespan is added to ours. As long as we kill them every now and then, we're immortal. But if we get lazy and forget, then we die." Misa made a mental note and labelled that as supremely important. "And the other way is… loving a human."

"Oh," Misa said simply. She understood it, some intuition jumping to the right conclusion, but she let Rem keep explaining anyway.

"Shinigami are gods of death. We're meant to kill humans. Whenever we kill a human, sure, that changes things. Sometimes that makes someone else's lifespan grow, but that's life. Everyone is connected to someone else. But if we kill, not to take a life, but to extend one… if we kill to make someone live longer… that is the gravest sin we can commit. And so we die."

Misa went silent for a while. "He saved me. He didn't have to… it was against his rules, it wasn't his job. But he saved me." She looked at her feet, no longer rocking them back and forth.

"Yes. His death note was all that was left. I thought the right thing to do would be to give it to you. He died to save you, after all."

"...yes. Yes, I understand. Thank you." She looked up at the shinigami's face again, and could've sworn she had seen her blush, but that was impossible. "Did Ryuk see the same thing? Another shinigami in love? In love with… with Yagami Light?"

"No. Ryuk, he… tricked the shinigami king." Shinigami king. Interesting. "That's how he got his extra death note."

"I see…" She sighed, and spun one more time. "I need time… to think about this. About all of this." She got up and started walking towards the stairs she had just descended, but then stopped. "Do humans get the life of their victims too, when they kill them?"

"No. That's only for shinigami."

"Oh. Okay." She continued walking, then stopped again. "Umm… do you… want to come with me? I wouldn't mind having some company while I thought. It's always better, you know." She looked over her shoulder and smiled. "To have someone to bounce ideas off of."

"Ah. Yes, of course," the shinigami said, and followed.

* * *

 _Later that night._

Rem was surprisingly helpful and forthcoming with the answers, and she was also interesting company. She seemed very curious about everything, if a bit disdainful, and Misa surmised she had probably never visited the human world before. She disliked humans in general—she hadn't said so, but it was pretty clear from the way she spoke—but for some reason she seemed pretty fond of Misa herself, who of course was milking that for everything it was worth.

The shinigami told her about times of death, about the Eyes of the Shinigami—an offer she politely but firmly refused—, about the extent to which she knew one could control victims—she didn't know much about that, apparently not having experimented—, and finally she offered to go back to the shinigami realm to read the rulebook and then tell Misa about it. That offer Misa gladly accepted—she would have preferred to read the book herself, but apparently humans weren't allowed (or able to, it wasn't clear) to read it—, so at the end of the night, they bid each other farewell and Rem took off towards one of the shinigami portals, promising to return in at most a week.

Which left a week for Misa to think about this carefully, and alone—though not completely, she had found, because apparently the shinigami had the ability to scry on any human they wished. Thankfully, possession of a death note rendered one immune to their effects, so neither Kira nor any shinigami (other than Rem herself) could kill her.

So she thought.

And thought.

And reached one conclusion. It was probably inevitable, really. All forms of time manipulation involved this to an extent, and most forms of the supernatural were made much more likely this way. But after being told about times of death, it was pretty certain.

God existed.

Probably not any specific god of any specific religion, and probably not in the spiritual sense of the word. But it was very likely that the world was not… natural.

In a fairly precise sense. If you imagined a myriad worlds, all "possible" ones, then you could divide them fairly easily into two categories.

The first, the natural ones, are worlds that are neatly described by simple mathematical laws, the whole of their existence being subsumed by those laws and implied by those lower levels. That was the universe as it had looked like, before this whole shinigami mess. Humans didn't know yet what the lowest-level rules were, exactly, but the whole endeavor of finding the Theory of Everything that would unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, explain quantum cosmology, etc, was all a reflection of a search for those natural laws.

And then you had magical worlds. Those would be the worlds where surface-level phenomena sometimes took precedence over low-level ones, or whose rules had special cases or were enormously complicated and involved things that aren't ontologically basic, like human minds. Human minds are huge and messy and made of billions upon billions of atoms, and any fundamental rules of behavior of nature that involved them… well, they would be what we'd intuitively call "supernatural."

But sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. She had been holding onto that hope. Maybe shinigami were sadistic aliens in control of mass murder nanotechnological weapons or something like that. There was surely some explanation that would make the universe remain natural.

But now, when people walked around with invisible dates of death floating above their heads, that hope had been dashed to pieces. Any form of future-scrying did, really. Misa had asked Rem, and as far as the shinigami knew, the only thing capable of changing a person's date of death was the action of a death note. It wasn't like these dates of death were approximations. They were exact, to the second. And what would it have taken to predict exactly that a random fan would follow Misa from the hardware store and then kill her? You'd need to know… from the time of her birth, you'd need to know everything that shaped her, every little accident that caused her to be at that particular store at that particular time; you'd need to know everything that had caused that particular fan to be particularly insane and also at that particular store.

Hypothesis one: not only did shinigami ultra-advanced technology kill people, it controlled them their entire lives, making it so that they knew exactly when people would die because they caused people to die.

Hypothesis two… and she couldn't believe that something had made that hypothesis be the foremost one…

There was an old thought experiment in physics, which went something like this: You put a cat in a box with a mechanism that might or might not kill it depending on a source of quantum randomness. The Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. Everyone had heard of it. This became more relevant, however, once you put a human in the box instead of a cat.

In Quantum Mechanics, the basic element of information was the quantum bit, usually called qubit. Because of Q.M.'s principles, unlike a classical bit, qubits exist in a superposition of two states, 0 and 1, instead of being entirely in either. That qubit and these states could be a lot of things, really: an electron and its spin, a photon and its polarization - it didn't really matter. What mattered was that once you measured the qubit, you'd observe it to be either in state 0 or in state 1. We knew that it had been in a superposition before we measured it because of some pretty ingenious experiments, but upon measurement you'd always observe exactly one of the two states. That irreversible process, after which the superposition was gone, was known as the wavefunction collapse.

When the qubit had been in a superposition, each state had had a complex number associated with it: its amplitude. Its most salient and obvious experimental effect was that, after measurement, the probability that a given state would be observed was proportional to the square modulus of its amplitude. Well, actually, the fraction of times that state would be observed in the long run.

(We knew the amplitude was actually a complex number instead of just a regular one because of some other very ingenious experiments.)

According to some interpretations of Q.M., that collapse process was fundamental and natural, and the part of the wavefunction that wasn't observed disappeared forever. According to some others, what actually happened was that humans, being part of the universe and also made of particles, got entangled with the particle, and the superposition still existed, but in a larger scale. That implied there were two versions of the human, one for each of the two possible states of the particle, and they were non-interacting.

The thought experiment, then, was a way to distinguish between those two families of interpretations of Q.M. It was called quantum suicide. The way it worked was: You rigged a machine to a "quantum coin" in an equal superposition between states 0 and 1, and you told it to toss that coin once per second. You got into the machine and activated it. Whenever it turned up 0, the machine would shoot you in the head; whenever it turned up 1, it wouldn't. The machine was a perfect black box, and anyone outside of it wouldn't be able to tell whether you'd been shot or not. If you made the machine run for one minute, the quantum coin would have flipped 60 times, and the only way you could be alive after that would be if the coin had turned up 1 every single time. The probability of that happening was 2⁻⁶⁰. However, if the Many-Worlds interpretation was correct, there would be some version of you that would have survived nonetheless. Subjectively, then, the probability you'd find yourself alive would be 1. You could run this experiment for as long as you might like, and it would just keep mounting evidence against collapse interpretations and for many-worlds interpretations.

However, that wasn't the point, Misa thought. The point was that, to an outside observer, you'd be on a superposition of dead and alive - tending towards dead the longer you remained in the machine - and they wouldn't be able to figure it out beforehand until they actually opened the machine and checked up on you. The principle that reality was local (events were influenced only by other events in their immediate neighborhood) and had counterfactual definiteness (every property of a system is determined and fixed before you measure it) was called local realism, and it had been experimentally proven that quantum mechanics lacked local realism. So either reality lacked counterfactual definiteness, or it lacked locality. Either way, knowing the result of an experiment in advance of the actual measurement violated the principles of quantum mechanics, no matter what interpretation you believed in.

And shinigami? Shinigami apparently violated that principle. They knew a person's time of death from the day they were born. Which meant that they knew at which exact second a person would die. So a shinigami watching you get into the machine would know the sequence of outcomes before the coin had been tossed. It wasn't enough to just predict the movement of the particles, like you would in classical physics. You had to actually violate the known laws to get that.

And of course, that just meant that quantum mechanics was completely and irrevocably wrong. She had the choice between believing the scientists' experiments and believing the shinigami. Now, when she was given a notebook that killed people at a distance, and even the opportunity to actually see people's dates of death… well, the shinigami were probably right.

But what then? What if quantum mechanics was wrong? Why did that imply the world was magical? Maybe it was still super advanced technology! Maybe the shinigami had messed with us, given us false information from our experiments so we'd think quantum mechanics was the correct theory to describe fundamental laws.

Now, ignoring the multitude of surface-level phenomena that happened explicitly and directly because of quantum phenomena...

Try to think about how one would go about computing—locally!—self-consistent time travel. You'd have a person at time t₀ progressing until time t₁. Then that person would travel back in time to time t₀. However, that would change the initial state of the computation! So you'd have to recompute it. And maybe, after recomputing it, the person would decide to do a different thing when going back in time, so you'd have to recompute it again with that different thing! Further, there was absolutely no guarantee that this would converge. Maybe each time you computed the time traveler, they'd decide to do a different thing, and so on, never settling on a stable time loop. Maybe one version would even choose to destroy the time machine. No matter what, it was impossible to guarantee that after a finite (or even infinite) number of iterations your time traveler would settle. The only way to really have that would be to simulate all "possible" universal configurations between times t₀ and t₁ and eliminating all but those that obeyed the constraints of consistency.

That implied any local, deterministic version of physics could not be used to build the universe. And those tended to be the simplest ones, purely functional. Then you added the fact that the information concerning the future was information about a person's death. You didn't have information about the position of an electron travelling back in time, you had information about the state of life of an entire person travelling back in time and keeping time consistent. The fundamental laws of the universe allowed for the transportation, back in time, of a human's time of death.

So that was hypothesis two. She was living in a world that was magical, and non-local.

Now for the next part of the argument. Imagine all consistent universes "existed" (even if notions like "existence" got a bit fuzzy here). If you drew a single universe from that pool of universes, a single computer program simulating it, would you expect it to be a natural one or a magical one? For a computer to simulate every possible program, it needed to do a breadth-first search, because otherwise it might find a computer program that never halted—presumably our universe never did—and then never compute the next programs in the list. It had to be a dovetailer. And how would you order these programs?

Scientists got a lot out of Occam's Razor, and with good reason. It worked. And it was the best way to check our models of reality against reality itself. It has turned out, every single time, that the simplest explanation that fits the data was the true one. So one may be left wondering why exactly that's true, why it is that Nature or God or the Tao or Mathematics or whatever seems to favor simplicity - though a man named Solomonoff once offered a very compelling explanation for that, one she was inclined to agree with. But regardless of why, it did work. If you trust that very strong hint that nature likes simplicity, then, one could argue, Nature would give more weight—maybe by way of a priority in the dovetailer—to simpler universes. Natural ones. And the magical ones would be, then, vanishingly rare. Finding yourself in a magical universe should be very, very surprising. So surprising, in fact, that another hypothesis would start becoming—on priors alone!—more probable than that you were in one of those magical universes nature was running.

See, there was a way magical universes could get more ticks than their fair share, that it could be more probable to find yourself in one. That way would be if the magical universe was embedded in a natural one. Or simulated in one, if you would.

And an almost inescapable consequence of being in a simulated universe? Someone was doing the simulating.

Conclusion one, which she would call the "weak magic hypothesis": she lived in a magical world. That was very probable now.

Conclusion two, which she would call the "strong magic hypothesis": that world had been created by an external intelligence. Some form of god existed. That wasn't a logical consequence of the weak magic hypothesis, it was only a probabilistic one, so that hypothesis was somewhat less likely than the weak one. Still, it was… more likely than not. Much, much more likely than not.

She put both hands on her face and propped her head on her elbows. This entire time, she had been sitting in front of her laptop, just thinking and chewing. Checking her own reasoning. But it was sound, she never expected it to be unsound, she had thought about it many times in many different circumstances.

What do you do if you figure out you're in the Matrix, but you're not Neo?

Well, at least she possessed the only known tool that had extra privileges in the system. How could she use a notebook that kills people to get humanity out of the box?

* * *

 _11:00PM. Yagami Household._

"Light-kuuuun… I'm booooored," Ryuk moaned upside down. "It's been two months and you have only killed like three people." He slowly turned so he was now upside up. "Did you lose it? Your drive? Your ambition?"

"Don't be stupid," the boy cut impatiently. "But this will probably take a while. I haven't been contacted by the Hacker since… well, for two months. I don't know why they didn't threaten me anymore, or even said anything. They wanted something from me, but what was it? Did they just want me to stop? Was that their plan all along?" He groaned in frustration, grabbing his own hair and pulling it. He had long since found the bug in his room and destroyed it, and invented some ways of preventing that to happen again. But now, with no way to contact the Mysterious Hacker, he could only speculate on what would happen.

...it was the not knowing that was driving him crazy, really. Not understanding. The Hacker clearly didn't want to rat him out for fear of being killed, or at least arrested - they had pulled some wildly illegal moves there, after some research Light had found that even if L had wanted to he wouldn't have been able to get permission to run the attacks the Hacker did. They seemed to be interested in his method of killing, and he had (apparently) successfully lied his way through that and escaped. They didn't know about the death note. So why… why had all communication stopped?

Light heard a little noise coming from his computer and looked up. There was a text document open with a single question in it: "Have you talked to god yet?"

He felt like his mind had just crashed against a wall. After all this time, this is what they sent him? "What do you mean?" he wrote on the next line.

"Never mind." The text document closed and that was that.

 _...what?!_

* * *

 _Amane Household._

So Yagami hadn't in fact reached her conclusion. Well, she wasn't certain of that, but it was probable. Okay. It was better not to bother him with it yet. She wasn't even sure she ought to, and he was probably torturing himself trying to figure out what she'd meant.

...that or he was playing the game one level above her and he had figured it out and he knew more than she did. That was always possible. Given the last conversation, misdirection was sort of the standard. However, he had answered her pretty quickly, which suggested that he hadn't had much time to think of the answer... She sighed. There was nothing she could really do about him right now. Her main question, whether he'd be a free source of aid, had been answered in the negative. She had better concentrate.

So she got up and closed her window, closed her door, made sure no one was looking at her—quite silly, really, now that she knew shinigami could scry on her and god existed, but it helped put her mind at ease—and whispered, "God? Are you there? Are you listening?"

She waited, holding her breath, slowly turning around and trying to notice anything that might be some sign from god. She imagined shinigami looking at her right now, ridiculously waiting for some god's answer, and blushed furiously in embarrassment, but never stopped. After one minute of waiting, she sighed and sat down in front of her computer.

 _Okay, figuring out that god actually really existed wasn't enough to make it reveal itself. That eliminated a whole class of possible gods. What kinds remained?_

This was probably not a simple old-fashioned Matrix kind of simulation. She could be an NPC in a game - or maybe even a main character, for all she knew. She did get the magical artifact. But well, she was getting lots of self-awareness there. Maybe it was part of the plot? And speaking of plot, she could be in some piece of fiction. Maybe god was a specimen of some super-advanced species capable of simulating self-aware minds in their own minds. But of course that left open the question of why the hell it would simulate humans in the first place.

What if she was in a plain old piece of fiction written by a plain old human? She didn't feel fictional, she felt very… very real. Deep, complex, human. But maybe… whenever people wrote fiction, their world got some kind of… spark?

She shook her head. That was ridiculous. But well, if she existed, there was probably some universe where someone was writing her story. A giggle escaped from the back of her throat, as it usually did whenever she conceived of scenarios that went counter to every intuition of hers, like free will. She waited for the feeling to go away, the giddiness of regarding a gigantic universe, and concentrated on her own reality.

What could she do with her tool to figure stuff out about the world? She didn't want to kill anyone. She was very, very opposed to that idea. But… maybe it would be necessary. Besides, what if there was some sort of afterlife? There was a god after all. But still, she couldn't assume. If she ever used the death note… she'd have to do it expecting to erase a human life from existence.

Oh great. Now she got herself depressed.

Still, it was… interesting that god had allowed her to figure out that much. She hadn't been snuffed out of existence, nor had her memory been erased - not yet, anyway. She was somehow… not terrified. Maybe god didn't want her to be. Maybe she should stop worrying so much about god, lest she call its attention to herself.

So she had to concentrate on something else: Yagami Light. He had a weapon of mass murder with him, a weapon that also happened to imply some form of god existed. And he had stopped killing. Because of her, of course. She had had to be clever, but she hadn't actually lied. She did make it harder for herself to find him in the future, though, but… having his identity, everything else would be fairly easy. Now, he planned on changing the world, making it a "better place," and the innocence with which he had undertaken the challenge…

Killing criminals. Of course he would have a new plan now, one that didn't involve mindlessly killing criminals, and she'd have to be a part of it.

As for god? Well. That'd be her side project. There was no rule saying that she deserved some reward from it, she might not even ever contact it. For as long as she didn't, though, she'd really have to focus on Yagami Light. And… she was not sure whether to aid him or stop him. She was his joker. Another giggle bubbled up from her throat. Maybe she was fiction. Having a nemesis wasn't something that happened in real life.

* * *

 _12:24AM. March 21, 2004. Yagami Household._

Ryuk had long since stopped worrying, and was content with floating upside down while he watched Light moan and rip his own hairs out, his eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, motionless on his bed. Light himself was pretty much done with trying to figure out the layers upon layers of possible meaning in the Hacker's message. Ryuk refused to share any information about the existence of gods (other than shinigami) or any form of afterlife. He did mention the shinigami king, but apparently the only way to contact him was by being a shinigami and arranging a meeting. And the king could always (and very often would) just say no.

In fact, Ryuk elaborated, very few people actually even knew what the king did all day. He was the source of death implements, and while many shinigami suspected he was also the father of all of them, no one had any recollection of their own conception. And while the intricacies of shinigami society were doubtlessly fascinating, Light wasn't interested, and either Ryuk didn't know or didn't care about them.

The boy suddenly sat up and said, "Whatever. This is not worth my time. They're just messing with me."

The shinigami looked at him and said, "Are you sure, Light?"

"No. I'm not. But I need to start planning for my next step in world takeover. School starts soon, I'll have to see how that affects me, and what new toys I'll get access to." He sighed. "I don't think I'll be doing much with the death note for a while, but maybe I can nudge the world to the right place, on a global scale, with it."

"What about the people chasing you?"

At that he just smiled.

* * *

nightelf37: And that is all I have managed to salvage. There is no more. Thank you for reading. I hope Scientist's Thesis will actually continue. His actual rewrite of it isn't seeing any progress so far. I worry. See ya on Third!


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